Across Bounding Interstellar Waves
by Rose's.wings
Summary: While the Ark travels the stars looking for the AllSpark, the femmes and Wreckers left behind on Cybertron continue to hold their own against Shockwave and his hoard of experimental soldiers. But not even they can hold out forever. In the chaos leading up to the second exodus and the ceaseless battle for survival, one lost mech struggles to find his way back home. [WJxMoonracer]
1. The Crystal Fields

Across Bounding Interstellar Waves

...

Sailing, sailing, over the bounding main,

For many a stormy wind shall blow

ere Jack comes home again.

~ Sailing, Sailing by Godfrey Marks

...

1 – The Crystal Fields – 1

It was so dark. He didn't know why, but it was.

Something in the back of his mind told him that it wasn't dark, he just couldn't see anything because they had been into his optics last, but he didn't trust his mind anymore. It was dangerous. Tainted. He could no more trust his mind then he could trust the guards to leave him alone.

His head snapped up at the thought, but of course he didn't see anything. So he stopped and listened for the tell tale signs of his restless, ruthless guards. They couldn't be allowed to catch him again. They would extinguish him permanently this time if they did.

Quiet surrounded him.

He remained frozen, unsure if this was just another trick on their part. They had been silent before. They had tricked him before. And the pain afterwards had been unbearable.

Only he _had_ born it. He had lived with it and now look at him. He had escaped, although he couldn't remember how. He was free.

He was completely _lost_ , but free.

Hesitantly, he took another step, still leery of his guards, but they never appeared. Dimly he heard the soft sound of powdered crystal under his feet. That was important because- because…

His mind failed him again. He shook it to try and clear it of the haze that had settled in after his last appointment with Shockwave – the one where he had taken his sight from him – but no matter what he'd done, he hadn't' been able to shake it off.

He wasn't sure how long he wandered over the shattered crystals. He could not see the place of the sun. His internal chronometer was busted. And he was already so weary that it was impossible to feel any worse.

He didn't know how long he walked, so he didn't know how long it was before he heard the snap.

It was a sharp, distinct sound. One that did not come from him. It came from somewhere else, off to his left. And if it didn't come from him, then the noise must have come from somebody else.

He froze once more amidst the crystals, knowing that at the moment he was standing in the middle of some large rubble by the echoes his footsteps had made moments before.

Once again silence greeted him. He had just about blamed the sound on his faulty processor when he heard another sound, one that was far more chilling.

It was the hum of a miniature ion cannon.

He tried to kick his hazy processor into motion, tried to remember how to _think_ , but he just couldn't do it. All he could remember was that the first things they had taken were his weapons and his armor, leaving great holes in his frame where they had been.

But today must have been a good day because one thought was miraculously followed by another; if he couldn't fight then he needed to hide.

Relying on his auditory systems, he shifted a step to his right, deeper into the shadow of what he thought was a crystal pillar. He froze again when his passage disturbed a smaller set of crystals, sending them falling to the ground with a muffled clatter.

Unsure of what to do, he stood there, praying to whoever would hear him that whoever was out there hadn't heard the crystals fall.

A moment later he heard a voice.

"Did you hear that?"

The voice was hard, but feminine; a femme, he realized. That made him feel better, but he couldn't think of why it should.

A second voice – softer, but still just as firm – answered the first. "Yeah." He found he liked the second voice much more then the first. He thought he might recognize her.

"Circle around," the first femme ordered as the hum of the ion cannon he heard earlier grew louder. "See if you can't find who made it."

The second femme must have nodded, because he heard no verbal answer. However he did hear the distinctive snap-lock as she cocked what he knew to be a semi-automatic shotgun. He thought of moving deeper into cover, but didn't want to take the risk of causing any more noise.

He listened hard, and was rewarded with the subtle footsteps of one of the femmes coming closer to the spot where he had been standing before. She sounded small, but sure of herself.

He suddenly knew that if he was caught, and this femme didn't recognize him like he _thought_ he recognized her, she would blast him first to the head, to throw him off balance, then to the chest, to finish he job.

He didn't know how he knew that, only that he did.

The footsteps came closer. They were almost right next to him now. If she just happened to turn slightly to her left-

He knew he had been found when he heard the femme emit an airless gasp, as if she was just as shocked to see him as he was horrified to hear her.

She didn't speak. She didn't move. She just breathed a prayerful, "Dear Primus…"

He still didn't move.

After a long moment, the femme spoke into her comm. "Hey Chromia, make your way over here. You're going to want to see this."

"What? What is it Arcee?" the lead femme asked anxiously back.

There was a moment of hesitation on Arcee's part before she answered, sounding blown away.

"It's _Wheeljack_."


	2. Those Left Behind

Wow, what a response! I don't think I've ever had such a wonderful and rapid response to a first chapter, and such a short one at that. Thank you all for the favs and alerts and even the reviews! You guys are so great and I really hope this story lives up to your hopes. :D

Right, so I was impatient to get the first chapter up that I left off some pertinent notes. **First** : this story will be updated **weekly**. Probably around Tuesday and Wednesday. **Second** : this is part of a series that starts with I Lost a World! and continues with The Long Road Home. This is a...micro-sequel if you will to Long Road. I don't plan for it to be very long, around twelve chapters, and it should take care of the loose ends I left on Cybertron at the end that aren't addressed in the future installment coming (relatively) soon. If you haven't read them, I of course suggest you do. If you haven't and don't feel like it right now, no worries! This takes place all on Cybertron and it focuses on the bots, so it's fairly self-contained. (Really I just want people to read it and love it. I'm a selfish author that way ;3)

Third: I Lost a World! is currently in the Fandom 2 contest over on ! I hope my past readers will go and vote for it! Just search up the name and click the heart to vote! Woohoo! x3

I think that's about it. You can see why I didn't want to leave all this last time I bet, huh? But thanks for reading and I hope you're excited to read the second chapter! :D

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Across Bounding Interstellar Waves

2 – Those Left Behind – 2

Then here's to the sailor,  
And here's to the soldier, too,  
Hearts will beat for him  
Upon the waters blue.

The Autobot femmes' base sat in the only place the Decepticons couldn't easily get to; underground. A handful of small entrances were scattered about, camouflaged on the surface by the debris and rubble that now covered the surface of Cybertron. Shockwave could search forever – and he had tried – and even then his chances of actually finding the base were severely limited. The femme commander made sure of that.

Elita-One walked down the underground corridor with swift, sure steps, but her processor wasn't nearly as focused as she followed the well-worn path to what passed for a medbay in their isolated base.

Yes, Shockwave had been looking for them for a long time now. A handful of stellar cycles, she had lost count of exactly how many. But enough that she often felt like she had been trapped down here all of her life. Long enough that at her most morose she often thought she would never seen the surface of her home again, or the stars, or Optimus...

Alone in the hall, Elita shook her head firmly. Now was not the time for melancholy thoughts. Usually she was better about not letting herself get dragged down by...everything, but Wheeljack's sudden reappearance was making it difficult to set thoughts of her own sparkmate aside.

Elita-One sighed, firmly setting thoughts of Optimus aside for when she didn't have so many things vying for her attention at once.

Honestly she was impressed their energon supplies had lasted this long, even severely rationed. Somehow there was always a new energon well to find, however small, just enough to get them through the next few orns. She had a strong feeling that perhaps the Core himself was helping them. But the wells were getting smaller and smaller the longer they stayed. Their departure time was coming up fast now. If they didn't find a way past Shockwave's planetary defenses, then they would be extinguished here.

Elita turned the last corner but stopped before the automatic sensors could pick her up and open the medical bay doors. She was still for a moment as she tried to forcibly relax tense muscle conduits. She was tired. Strut-weary honestly. She couldn't remember the last time she'd gotten any decent recharge.

She rubbed at her optics and leaned back against the wall. Just for a moment, she told herself. She knew she was putting off the inevitable, but she'd already gotten a good look at Wheeljack when her sisters had brought him in and she had no desire to see that again so soon.

Elita shuttered her optics and leaned her head against the wall with a muted _thunk_. They should probably collapse the entrance Chromia and Arcee had used to get Wheeljack inside. Just to ensure no Decepticons that may have been watching could use it against them.

Elita felt her mouth turn down at one corner. That would leave only four entrances to their base. The sad part was they had started out with eleven.

 _"At this rate it won't be them getting in that'll be the problem, it'll be us getting_ out _."_ Elita thought as she stood against the wall.

Deep down she knew she could consider this later. That the only reason she was thinking about this now was because she didn't want to think about what was happening inside that medbay, in the makeshift medical wing Alpha Trion had set up when they'd moved in. It wasn't as good as the wing in their original home base, Elita thought – the one where Arcee had been brought up – but it was all they had. They couldn't return to their long time home because it had been destroyed during that last big conflict when most of the Autobots had escaped into space, Megatron and a large portion of his Decepticons following.

Elita vented a sigh, the slight sound loud in the silent hall. There was no use comparing now. It wasn't like they could go back.

Frustration overtook her melancholy quickly and Elita pushed herself off the wall. She didn't like putting things off, and unable to find another reason to keep herself from going in, she quickly stepped through the automatic door into the medbay.

It smelled like every other medical bay Elita had ever been in. The strong smell of disinfectant overlaid the lingering stench of oil and stale energon that could never quite be cleaned away. The room was small with only ten beds lined up in two rows, one on each side of the room. Curtains that could be used to section off the beds hung from metal rods, the cold air blowing down from the ceiling vents making the thready green fabric sway slightly. Fortunately at this exact moment, none of the beds were occupied.

Unfortunately that was because Alpha Trion's only patient was in what passed for their emergency room. Elita couldn't see much through the single, smudged up window that separated the two rooms. Wheeljack was lying on a hospital gurney that was set against the far wall so that only his stabilizing servos could be seen from where she stood. The room's overhead lights were tinged green by the energon reserves hooked into Wheeljack's fuel lines and as she watched, bright showers of sparks sprayed up as the Archivist began to the long process of welding armor back into its proper place.

Elita stood silent and still for several long cycles, frowning as she watched Alpha Trion finish with the welder and then come around the berth for different tools before once again disappearing beyond the limited view of the window.

She scowled at the glass in front of her, a harshly vented gust of air misting up the clear surface for a moment. From this angle she could see very little of the Autobot engineer where he had been laid out on the room's only circuit slab, but even if she could see all of him, she doubted she would have immediately recognized him. His frame was so deteriorated he was almost unrecognizable. Missing parts. Gaping holes in his frame that looked like someone had just reached in and ripped out his weapons systems with their bare hands. Secondary systems like optic sensors disabled. Nothing that would extinguish him outright of course, but things no one had any right removing in the first place.

Elita's scowl deepened. She hadn't thought anybot could survive treatment like that, but apparently she'd been wrong. As she watched Alpha Trion work around the engineer's open chest plates to stabilize his spark, she wasn't sure if that was a relief or not.

It felt like only minutes before she heard a commotion begin to build outside the medbay's single door. The femme checked her chronometer and blinked in surprise. She'd been here longer than she'd thought. The latest scouts must have checked in a few cycles ago.

 _"It didn't take her very long to hear the news..."_ Elita thought, her mouth set in a grim expression. She'd hoped to have a little bit longer before Firestar's team returned.

The commotion was getting closer as Elita straightened up and adjusted her armor. She could hear the noise of two or more femmes arguing out in the hall. The higher voice – it sounded like Greenlight, Elita thought – was trying to keep the other femme away, but she was having none of it.

"- _get outta my way!_ "

Elita slowly shuttered her optics, mentally preparing herself for what was coming.

The door swished open as the sensors registered movement and the muffled voices resolved into various pleas to calm down.

Moonracer had no intention of doing anything even remotely 'calm'. "For Primus sake let me _through!"_

Elita turned in time to see Moonracer break away from the two worried femmes trying to keep her out of the medbay. Refusing to calm down, Moonracer came careening into the quiet room, optics wide and worried with neon blue coolant running down her face to try and keep her rising core temperature in check.

Greenlight made to grab her friend by the arm – to forcibly drag her from the medbay if she had to – but a slight headshake from Elita held her back. Greenlight stared at her, obviously worried about Moonracer, but another gesture from the lead femme had her hesitantly backing away. Elita waited for Greenlight and Lancer to leave, although Greenlight gave Moonracer one last anxious look before finally leaving her be.

Not that Moonracer noticed. She was glued to the window, clinging to the small sill as she stared at what little she could see of the missing engineer.

She was out of her processor with worry. That couldn't have been more obvious if she'd been screaming out her sparkache. If it had been any other mech lying in the other room, Elita would have been surprised by Moonracer's panic. The younger femme was usually so optimistic, even in these dark times. But it wasn't just any mech. It was Wheeljack.

It had been fairly obvious to almost every other bot how the younger femme felt about the engineer back before the discovery of dark energon had decimated an already ruined world. Or at least it had been obvious to everyone except said engineer and, thankfully, Ratchet. No one had been completely sure if the cantankerous old medic would have sided with his, albeit unrelated, niece or his oldest friend if the two had ever gotten their act together, but if the femme commander remembered right there had been quite the substantial betting pool surrounding the discussion.

But none of that – even Ratchet's imagined explosion if he ever found out about the attraction between the two bots closest to him – mattered to Moonracer as she came to a hard stop outside the observation window next to Elita, because none of it changed the fact that the engineer had yet to regain consciousness.

A part of Elita couldn't forget that there was a distinct chance that Wheeljack might never wake up again, but she couldn't bring herself to remind Moonracer about that right now. And besides, from the look on the sea green femme's face, she was already well aware of the odds.

For a long moment, Elita watched as Moonracer stared, mouth slightly open, through the observation window. From where the two femmes stood, they could only make out Wheeljack's feet and the lower part of his shins. Even that was more than enough to display the state he was in. Most of his paint had been scoured off and deep dents told the likeliest story as to how. Armor had been removed and in several places Elita could see internal wiring between the gaps. Through one particularly ragged hole in his shin plating, she could make out the occasional spark where wiring critical to movement had been cut and only partially reconnected – probably by Wheeljack himself so he could at least try and get around, although his walking was still seriously impaired.

The rest of Wheeljack's body was just as badly emaciated. Thankfully Alpha Trion had pulled a curtain around to conceal the rest of the engineer's frame.

 _"Thank Primus,"_ Elita thought. At least Moonracer could be spared that sight. For now.

The younger femme suddenly made a dash for the door, but Elita managed to grab her wrist, holding her back.

"Moonracer wait," Elita tried when the other femme kept trying to reach the door.

"Let me go!" Moonracer yelled, not looking back as she tried to pry Elita's strong hand off of her wrist.

"Moonracer-"

"I've got to see him-"

"Moonracer-"

"You don't understand-"

" _Luna!_ " Elita finally shouted.

Aria's nickname for the younger femme must have made it through the haze of panic, disbelief, and shock clouding Moonracer's processor, because she suddenly stopped struggling and sank to the floor, her legs giving out from under her.

"You don't understand," she said again with half a sob, large blue optics begging Elita to try. "I thought- when we couldn't find him after so long I figured-"

She finally broke down, unable to finish that one sentence.

Elita knelt down next to Moonracer, wrapping a comforting arm around her shoulders as the younger bot buried her face in her hands and cried. She sounded like her spark was being torn apart.

"You thought what we all thought," Elita told her gently, although she wasn't sure why she said anything at all. Words wouldn't make Moonracer stop leaking. "You couldn't have known he was still online."

Surprisingly that made Moonracer look up. "But he was," she said in what would have been a fierce voice if hadn't been so filled with static from crying. "He was and I didn't find him. And they-he-"

She trailed off, optics looking far away as she remembered the damage she had seen from the window. She had hung around Ratchet enough that she knew that most of those weld marks had been made in a hurry, probably self done. Most of them would leave scars.

Elita looked up as a dark blue and silver femme entered the room. Chromia met her sister's gaze briefly before she went up to the window to see how the engineer was doing. She grimaced when she saw, which told Elita more then she wanted to know about the situation.

She quickly turned her attention back to Moonracer's haunted look. "We have him now," she reminded the other femme firmly, leaving no room for doubt in her tone. "And we won't give him up again so easily."

"Besides," Chromia said, her voice uncharacteristically soft," Alpha Trion's looking after him now. If anybot can work miracles, it's him."

Elita's faceplates tightened slightly. She looked down at her free hand and stretched the pink and gray digits almost experimentally. She knew better than most the extent of the old mech's skill. Even after all this time as Elita-One, sometimes she still felt like Ariel put in a body that was too big for her.

Moonracer must have found some real comfort in the reminder, however small, because she scrubbed her face and gave a tight nod, even as another tear streaked down her face. Despite her watery optics, she stared stubbornly at the floor ahead of her, determined not to break out into sobs again.

At least, not until Elita wrapped her in an understanding hug. The young femme buried her face in the elder's shoulder, unable to stop shaking.

Despite the distinctly military relationship necessity had forced upon them, Elita tried to look after her girls as if they were just as much her sisters as Chromia and Arcee. But this…this struck particularly close to home.

Elita looked up at Chromia and their gazes locked. She knew they were each thinking the same thing. That it could just as easily have been Ironhide or Optimus in Wheeljack's place – left behind because there hadn't been enough time or untainted energon to go back for them _and_ get the bulk of the Autobot forces off planet.

Somehow, Elita thought as she went back to trying to comfort Moonracer and Chromia returned her attention to the window, that only made things worse.

...

Moonracer stayed by the ER window long after other business called Chromia and Elita away. She stood there, arms wrapped around herself for some semblance of comfort as she gnawed at her lower lip. She was jittery from a mess of raw nerves and exhaustion and her hands shook whenever she loosened her grasp on her upper arms.

The late hour turned early before Alpha Trion finally came out of the ER. Moonracer dimly noted his dull coloring from where she had her forehead leaned against the window, waiting for something to change.

She jerked her head back with a sharp intake of air when her weary processor finally registered the movement. By then Alpha Trion had left the room and closed the door firmly behind him, stepping out into the waiting room with her.

The old mech held up his hands before Moonracer could even try and get past him to Wheeljack.

"He'll live," he told her first, but then added before she could smile in relief, "but you shouldn't disturb him. He's been through a lot. He needs to rest."

Moonracer could have collapsed and wept from relief. A precarious smile appeared on her faceplates. "You mean he'll be okay?" Her words were weak and unsteady, but understandable.

Alpha Trion's face didn't change from its carefully composed neutral expression. A long moment of silence passed between them while the old mech argued over if he should tell her the full extent of the damage or not.

"I don't know," he finally said. "They damaged more than just his frame. I fear there is a chance of mental damage, and it will be some time before he is fully healed, but he will live."

Moonracer stared at the old mech. She didn't know what to say. She couldn't think anymore. Her spark was pounding and her cooling vents kept hiccupping before they could bring her internal temperature down. She was too hot and the room was starting to spin.

Steady hands appeared on her upper arms, keeping her upright before she collapsed to the floor. "Alright, here we go." She vaguely heard Alpha Trion say as he propelled her to a chair. "Come on young one, sit down."

As weak as her knees were it wasn't difficult to find herself sitting down, but it still took her processor a cycle to realize what had happened.

Alpha Trion's words were distorted when he spoke. "You should rest too," he told her gently. "You've been out here for hours. Elita-One told me you'd just come in when you heard about Wheeljack."

He placed aged hands on either side of her face as he spoke and angled her face up so he could look at her optics. A light he had originally used for late night reading came on at the side of his head and he flicked it over her optics to make sure he got the proper reaction.

Moonracer flinched at the bright light, but even that took effort.

Alpha Trion turned off the light again, and frowned as he inspected the young femme's face. "When was the last time you recharged?"

Moonracer couldn't even bring herself to think about the answer. "When can I see him?" she asked. It was the only thing in her head and it kept running around her processor in circles.

"When he wakes up," Alpha Trion replied evenly. "Which will probably be well after you wake up." He straightened up and sighed with the effort. "You're exhausted but if you don't think you'll be able to sleep I can give you something that will help."

Moonracer was shaking her head before she had even fully processed Alpha Trion's words. "No," she said, voice warbling from extreme emotion and too little rest, "no I want to stay."

Alpha Trion raised a bushy optic ridge at her and then tried to pull her to her feet anyway, but Moonracer wrapped an arm around the back of her chair and refused to budge.

The old mech gave up and sighed again. "Stubborn femmeling," he grumbled and then conceded reluctantly. "You need recharge. Driving yourself to exhaustion isn't going to do Wheeljack any good."

That, at least, got through her over-emotional haze. She jerked her head up to look up at the old mech, but even now he was fuzzy, out of focus.

Moonracer screwed her optics shut and rubbed at them to try and bring the world back into focus. "Wheeljack-" she started and then forgot what she was going to say. Her optic shutters fluttered in consternation as she tried hard to remember.

Alpha Trion grunted. "Alright, that's enough," he grumbled more to himself than the femme. "Come on. You're going to recharge and since you refuse to be sensible and go back to your quarters, you're going to recharge in the other room."

Moonracer opened her mouth to protest. The next room was too far away. She'd never hear Wheeljack if he needed her-

" _I'll_ tell you if he wakes up before you," Alpha Trion told her as he ushered her into a ward filled with empty beds. "Now go on. Get some sleep."

He finally let go of her wrist and moved away to pull a blanket off one of the other beds. When he turned back, Moonracer was gone. He turned around to try and find the turquoise-colored femme and only just saw the door to the ER swish close.

The old mech's mouth set into a grim line and he sighed through his nasal plating. He really wished she had listened to him...

Moonracer pushed through the double doors that led into the surgery, spark pounding against her armor. The lights were unforgiving in the small space, revealing everything Moonracer had never wanted to see.

Her cooling fans hitched when she saw him. The dents and rents and holes that littered what was left of his frame. He'd always had a sturdy frame, with a wide, rounded chest and broad shoulders to make room for his twin torpedo launchers. But now? Now Moonracer doubted he could even lift one.

But that wasn't the worst of it. The worst was that Alpha Trion had lied; Wheeljack _was_ awake.

He sat there, legs hanging over the edge of the mechasurgeon's table like he was in the middle of standing up. His hands sat uselessly in his lap as if he was unaware of their existence as he sat staring straight ahead of him. His optics were a dim but steady blue in the bright room and for a nano-klik Moonracer thought he was looking right at her.

Except he wasn't she realized, spark shrinking in her chest. He was staring straight through her, like she wasn't even there. Or like he couldn't see a single thing.

Suddenly feeling weak and scared, Moonracer took a half step back. Maybe he wasn't really awake, she thought, maybe this was just some sort of medical induced stupor or- or-

"Wheeljack?" Moonracer finally gathered up the courage to whisper. "Jack can you- can you hear me?"

No response.

Desperation rising in her spark, Moonracer stepped closer until she was right in front of him. She leaned down and put her hands over his, but they didn't move. She was standing right in front of him. He had to see her now. He _had_ to.

"Wheeljack," Moonracer tried again and when that got the same lack of response she begged, " _Jackie_ _look at me_."

She was the only one that got to use that name without repercussions. Usually it got a light cringe out of him at the very least.

But still nothing.

He sat there, still as lifeless metal, and Moonracer felt the emptiness in him like a knife through the spark. She felt her frame heat up as despair overwhelmed her and coolant leaked over her face to try and regulate her temperature. She sank to her knees, fans hiccupping in distress, but even then she still couldn't bring herself to let go of his hands.

Moonracer dimly registered Alpha Trion gently pulling her away as she cried. He led her back into the waiting room, only stopping to drop the spare thermal blanket around her shoulders before propelling her to one of the empty circuit slabs.

Exhausted and sick at spark, Moonracer sat down without much prompting, coolant tears still running down her faceplates. But even sitting there was more than she could manage, and it wasn't long before she curled up on the slab, legs drawn up to her chest to try and keep out the cold she felt sinking into core.

Coolant pooled under her head as she lay there trying to lose herself in recharge. She cried because it wasn't fair. Because they never even got the chance to be together like some of the other mechs and femmes had. Because Shockwave was a monster that would never even know what he had taken from them. But mostly...

Mostly Moonracer cried because she knew she'd only been deluding herself in the ER. She had no doubt Wheeljack was conscious, that he could hear and see her as she'd stood there, that he _had_ come back...

He just hadn't come back to her.


	3. Absent Minded

Happy New Year's everyone! I hope 2016 becomes wonderful and grand for each of you.

Now I love Christmas, but between family and presents and wrapping and baking, it _does_ mangle the schedule like nothing else. So here is your (slightly overdue) chapter. Anyone reading my original story _Life on the Hybridian Way_ or my Avisney story _The Lost Avatar & Other Tales of the Four Nations_, new chapters are coming soon. This is just the most ready and complete. I hope you like it and please review at the end if you feel inspired! ;3

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Across the Bounding Interstellar Waves

3 – Absent Minded – 3

"My heart is pierced is by Cupid,

I disdain all glittering gold.

There is nothing can console me,

but my jolly sailor bold."

"So how is he?"

Elita-One vented a sigh and shuttered her optics before answering Ultra Magnus' question. "He is...not himself," she finally answered. "Alpha Trion has repaired much of the structural damage Shockwave inflicted, however he has yet to respond to anything. It's like-" How had Aria once put it? "It's like the lights are on, but there's no one home."

The holographic image of the Wrecker commander processed this. "I see," he murmured after a moment of thought. "Pity. We could really use his ingenuity right about now."

Elita-One frowned but nodded. What Shockwave lacked in creativity he more than made up for in brute strength and abject cruelty. Shockwave would cross lines other bots couldn't even fathom because he had no lines to begin with. Everything was fair game to him.

In short he was a monster, and sadly a genius as well. No doubt that was how the Beast – a mindless, bottomless, eating monstrosity larger even than Omega Supreme – had come into existence. Wheeljack could have helped even their odds if he'd been...self-aware.

"Alpha Trion says there is a chance that he might snap out of it still once his processor realizes he is safe."

Ultra Magnus' stern face did not change, but then it rarely did. "How great of a chance?"

Elita-One flinched before she could stop herself. She had never been as good as her sparkmate's brother at keeping her emotions to herself.

The Wrecker commander nodded, faceplates falling just slightly. "I see," he murmured. For a nano-klik he looked away in a rare display of anxiety. When she had first met the mech as Ariel, shortly after she and Optimus had become involved, Elita hadn't known what to make of him. He had been so closed off, seemingly uncaring, that she had drawn the conclusion that he just hadn't liked her, as if he thought she wasn't good enough for his brother the new Prime.

It had taken her some months to realize that Ultra Magnus was like that with every bot. His entire life he had been consumed with his duties as a soldier and later commander. Even now – especially now – everything he did, he did to ensure the survival and victory of his squad and the Autobot cause.

The Wreckers knew this better than anyone functioning. Elita thought it was the main reason they respected Magnus, despite his iron bound sense protocol and their near-complete lack of respect for it.

It was also why he was taking Wheeljack's condition so hard. With Optimus gone, Cybertron – and all the bots still trapped on its surface – were left in their hands.

Elita glanced down at her own servos, suddenly thinking of Moonracer. She needed to keep a closer optic on the young femme for the time being. When Wheeljack had first been captured at Tyger Pax, the femme had been inconsolable, barely able to function under the immense stress that had colored those hectic orbits. She had come out of her depression since then, or had at least been able to wall it off so it didn't interfere with her day-to-day existence, but with Wheeljack back, Elita wasn't sure how Luna would cope. Or if she could cope at all...

Magnus grunted as he set aside his brief indulgence of concern, the sound jolting Elita out of her own thoughts as well.

"There's nothing we can do for him right now. If he comes to, wonderful, and if not-" He paused, face stern. "-well it's not like we've lost anything more."

It was a hard thing to say, but Ultra Magnus had never shied away from hard truths, and he wasn't about to start now.

Elita vented a soft sigh and nodded. "What is the Beast's present location?" she asked, moving on to other business.

Ultra Magnus nodded sharply, shoulders straightening in a ready position he'd first learned at the Iacon Military Academy. Elita didn't even think he registered it anymore. "Topspin reported in this morning; its crossed into what remains of Engineer City at the Altihex-Vosian border. It appears to be...shedding. We've collected samples, however Triage is still unable to tell me just what the Beast is made of. All he can tell is that it _is_ Cybertronian in origin, possibly a mutation of some kind created by Shockwave."

Elita frowned, creases forming between her optic ridges. "I have no doubt about Shockwave's involvement. What I want to know is is this is another failed experiment he wanted out of his lab or did he set it loose on purpose to distract us as he continues his experiments?"

Ultra Magnus nodded. He'd wondered that himself as they had tracked the Beast's seemingly random movements across what was left of Cybertron.

Elita fidgeted, energon tanks sloshing uncomfortably. "Is it still...feeding?"

Magnus nodded. "Topspin says he saw it digest an entire cyber-cat clan last orbit. It appears to prefer living metal, like scraplets, however we've seen it dig up cold frames from rubble before consuming them as well."

Elita's frown deepened. "Not particularly picky, is it?"

"It appears not," Magnus agreed. If he felt any of the same sickness Elita did at the thought of the monster consuming their dead he did not show it. "And we haven't found a way to make it stop either. Once it notices living bots following it, it drops whatever it has and goes after them. We can't even get close to it without heavy losses."

Elita nodded. "Then we shouldn't try," she told him. "Not yet anyway. Perhaps if we can find out more about its construction, we can find a way to kill it. Send Alpha Trion some of the samples you collected. Perhaps he can make more out of them than Triage."

Ultra Magnus nodded sharply. "I'll send them immediately through the Praxus Pass. Have Moonracer meet us-"

"No," Elita firmly interrupted before he could finish. "Not Moonracer. I'll send Roulette and Molly. They know that route just as well."

Ultra Magnus actually frowned at her. Well, at least he looked somewhat grimmer than before, so Elita supposed it was his version of a frown. "Moonracer knows the way better than any of us left here," he reminded her, as if Elita needed it.

"I know," she told him voice softening. "However she is in no position to go. The others are."

Ultra Magnus' optics glanced away as he skimmed through reports nearby. "Was she injured? I was unaware of any Decepticon activity in your area-" he trailed off. Elita could hear the datapads clacking as he searched for some reasonable explanation.

She waved a hand and shook her head. "No, Moonracer is fine, physically."

The lines around Magnus' optics deepened. "Then what's the problem?"

Elita hummed to herself. Moonracer's emotional upheaval wasn't anyone else's business, not even Ultra Magnus'.

She finally settled for the oblique. "I'm afraid that Wheeljack is not the only one who is not himself right now," she told him.

Ultra Magnus frowned deeper, and then his optic ridges rose in understanding.

"Oh."

...

If she had been aware of the commanders' conversation, Moonracer would have agreed with Elita-One; she did not feel like herself. She felt harried and guilty and torn to her core. The past three orbits since Chromia and Arcee had brought Wheeljack back had been a nightmare, one that wouldn't end.

"Come on Jackie, you've got to refuel sometime. If you move your mask then we can get you some of the good stuff. No more of this medi-grade IV scrap."

It was hard to keep her voice light, but she somehow managed to as she watched Wheeljack where he sat on the circuit slab. Alpha Trion had moved him yesterday once Wheeljack had stabilized. He was still gravely wounded, and he couldn't have moved on his own even if he'd been awake, but so far all of the old mech's patches and repair welds seemed to be holding.

Unfortunately, so was Wheeljack's mental state.

Moonracer leaned close enough that she could feel the waves of heat coming off of Wheeljack's frame as it fought off infection and spark-sickness. "Don't tell anyone," she told him in a whisper, "but I found a few sticks of pink energon the other orbit. The sweet stuff from before the war, remember?"

She held up two of the rare candy sticks for him to see. He didn't give any sign that he'd heard.

Moonracer looked down at her feet a brief klik before snatching hold of her strength. "These are a real treat for me." She told him as she cracked one of the sticks open and dabbed some of the precious sweetened energon on her tongue. "I was in the management support caste back before the war. They assigned me to a bot that kept accounts in lower Praxus." She shrugged, recalling her past life with no feeling at all, no fondness or bitterness of any sort. "Pretty much I was his secretary. I ran errands, filed data pads, that kind of thing. It was a meaningless job to fit a meaningless life. I don't even remember his name now..."

She trailed off, trying to remember for a handful of seconds the name of her former boss, and then gave up with a shake of her head. "I guess it doesn't matter now. I didn't have a chance to do a single important thing with my life back then. Not like you." She half smiled. "I mean, I know they banned you from the med centers themselves after you nearly took out the west wing of Iacon Southern, but at least you can be proud of the things you did back then. Working with Uncle Ratch', saving bots even from a distance," she smiled at him, the movement reaching her optics for the first time, "you're some kind of amazing, you know that?"

Wheeljack kept staring into the distance.

Moonracer took another taste of the pink energon, savoring the rare flavor, and then went on as if Wheeljack was his old self.

"I brought you something." She told him, trying to smile as she pulled an old, crinkled up piece of paper out of her subspace. "I brought it with me when we left Iacon. I know it wasn't mine anymore, but I couldn't stand to leave it behind I guess." She admitted as she carefully smoothed the paper flat over her knees before holding it up so he could see it.

"It's your valentine, see? The one I made you when 'Cee and the others were little. Do you remember?"

She waited briefly for an answer and then went on, fans hitching up a notch as she re-read the familiar words of her goofy poem. The ink had faded so much it was almost illegible, but she'd memorized it years ago.

" _My love is like organic cabbage, but I'll divide it into two. The leaves I give to Uncle Ratch', but my spark I give to you._ " She recited for him. "Signed with those funny organic kisses and hugs and everything. Remember that?"

She held up the rectangular valentine again. The paper was soft in her hands from all the times she had taken it out and stared at it, remembering him. She couldn't remember how many nights she'd cried herself to sleep after so much time had passed that they had all given Wheeljack up for dead.

"You never knew I was the one who made it though." She murmured as she smoothed the torn edges of the paper. "I never told you. I had hoped you would figure it out and ask me about it, but you never did. Aria said you were just shy, and I guess I was too, but I always hoped you'd give me some sort of sign that you knew it was me. That I wasn't just some idiot secretary wanting someone who was out of her league."

Moonracer went silent, shoulders slumped as she stared down at the wrinkled valentine in her lap. She smoothed one of the torn corners without thinking about it. "I guess that was another thing I never told you." She finally murmured.

Wheeljack didn't respond. Just stared off into space like always as his fingers gave a slight twitch.

Unable to stand it any longer Moonracer reached and grabbed his hand with both of hers and made herself meet his blank optics. "Wheeljack, I'm-I'm sorry. I'm so sorry. I wish to Primus that I'd had the guts to say something before. I should've told you I liked you when I had the chance, but please," she begged, praying he could hear her now, " _please_ don't tell me I'm too late. Please come back to me."

She didn't expect an answer. Not really. She had hoped for one, with one tiny corner of her spark that still couldn't bear to give up yet, but that wasn't the same.

If she hadn't been holding so tight to his digits she wouldn't have noticed them move. Moonracer looked down, wide optics blinking in surprise. For a nano-klik she thought it was another involuntary spasm. There was so much damage to his nervous circuits that twitches were expected.

Except it didn't _look_ like a random muscle cable twitch. It looked- well, call her crazy, but it _looked_ like he was trying to write something.

Moonracer's head snapped up, hope spiraling out of her control even though his optics still stared blankly at nothing. Could he hear her? Was he trying to tell her something? Had he been trying to speak all this time but couldn't and now was trying to find a different way to tell her?

Spark pounding in her chassis as questions flooded her central processor, Moonracer watched Wheeljack's half-hidden faceplates with renewed intensity, but she couldn't tell if he was with her or not.

It didn't stop the hope crashing over her weary spark or her hand from shaking as she reached up and gently touched the side of his face.

"Jackie?" she dared to whisper. "Can you hear me?"


	4. Elsewhere

Right so, been in a funk lately. Trying to shake it off but I do apologize for my late posting.

And thank you 2211Nighthawk, My SparkAndHeart, northpeach, and Decepticonsniper for your reviews! I love hearing from everybody so I hope you enjoy the next chapter. :)

...

Across the Bounding Interstellar Waves

4 – Elsewhere – 4

^..^

"Never more to sail my ship  
Where no man has gone before  
And I will go sailing no more"

 _I Will Go Sailing No More by Randy Newman_

^..^

Wheeljack was well aware that his mind was...elsewhere. It had taken him some time to perfect it, disconnecting his mind from his body, but he'd found it was the best way to deal with Shockwave's persistence and physical torture. The mind games though...

 _"Jackie? Can you hear me?"_

Wheeljack flinched from the familiar voice and tried not to remember who it belonged to. _"No!"_ he thought after it, knowing better than to actually answer. _"Go away!"_

It did not. He could still feel its hazy presence nearby, ruining what was left of his concentration. He turned his back on it – mentally anyway – and tried to focus on the numbers streaming through his processor. They'd been his constant companions for a long time now and he refused to question where they came from, even though he suspected what they were being used for. But they gave him some modicum of peace in this slagheap. A peace which he desperately needed.

He had nothing to write with and nothing to write on, but that had never stopped him before. He watched the stream for a moment before starting the long process or sorting out the numbers in his head, catching the important ones and laying them out on the imagined floor. When he had what he needed he grasped an extra eleven out of the air and pulled the ones apart, using one as a division line and tearing the other in half before rearranging it into a plus sign.

He could still hear the ghost whispering behind his shoulder.

 _"Come on Jackie,"_ she pleaded with him, _"look at me!"_

Wheeljack squeezed his optic shutters closed, resisting the urge to turn around with what strength he had left. That's what he wanted. Shockwave would win if he gave into the voices now.

 _"Numbers,"_ Wheeljack thought dimly, _"numbers do not lie."_

But they could be wrong. He frowned as he focused on the string of numbers laid out in their specific patterns at his feet. This sequence was wrong. He wasn't getting the answer he should have. If he put that into the rest of the equations, the non-sentient machine he was in charge of wouldn't run.

 _"Wheeljack please!"_ The ghost kept on pleading. It was starting to dissolve around the edges as Wheeljack successfully ignored it. Soon it would be nothing but static in his audios.

 _"Won't beat me today."_ Wheeljack thought to the enemy he couldn't see. _"Try again tomorrow."_

It wasn't much of a taunt since he knew Shockwave would.

 _"Jackie?"_ the voice whispered again, but it was fading now.

Wheeljack could hardly hear it anyway. His attention was fixed and nothing – not even Shockwave – could get in now.

Unaware of anything except his numbers, Wheeljack crouched down and continued writing figures out on the floor of his mind.

...

Elita was waiting in the command center when Triage arrived, flanked on either side by Roulette and Molly. The femmes themselves were an unusual contrast – Roulette with her joyful yellow and purple accents and her somber face clashed with Molly's more subdued gray and brown camouflage and her youthful bravado – but add in the Wrecker medic and suddenly watching them was like watching one of those comedy acts that had been popular with the higher-middle castes before the war.

"Oh come on Tree," Molly was saying as the three of them came through the door, "it wasn't _that_ close. The Decepticon was still a foot away. You were perfectly safe." The young femme insisted with a causal wave of her arm as they stepped through the double doors.

Triage slanted a glare at the femme that was worthy of Ratchet himself. "Clearly you were sparked after the youngling centers were destroyed." He muttered.

Molly stopped, optics blinking in confusion. "Well, yeah, but how'd you know that?"

Triage snorted through his vents, sounding twice his age. "Because anyone that went to school would actually know how long a foot was!" He snapped. "Face it femmling, you almost shot me!"

Elita shook her head as her youngest recruit discounting Arcee took immediate offense, mouth opening wide. "I did not!" she yelled. " _You_ were the one who almost got in my way!"

Triage snorted again. "No wonder Ultra Magnus won't let you be a Wrecker," he grumbled as he stomped forward. "You're too foolhardy even for us!"

For a moment Molly was too angry even to speak. Everyone who had audios knew how fiercely she wanted to be a Wrecker. But however many times she tried for reassignment, Ultra Magnus turned her down, citing she was too young, too undisciplined, even too unruly to be a Wrecker.

Elita-One didn't disagree with him. Molly hadn't yet learned how to temper her headstrong stubbornness, always thinking she knew what needed to be done before anyone else. But when she did learn, Elita thought she would make a fine addition to Magnus' team.

Triage and Molly were still arguing halfway between the entrance and Elita's command chair, stationed in front of the large monitors and computer systems she used to keep an eye on the world above their base, but she had managed to tune them out. She'd had lots of practice at it after all.

Roulette looked like she was having a harder time of it. "Commander," she murmured when she was close enough to be heard under their noise. To anyone else the femme would have appeared stoic and unmoved by the others' bickering, but after three orbital cycles of listening to the two Elita saw the signs of strain breaking through Roulette's mask.

She raised an optic ridge at her. "Rough journey?"

Roulette ground something in the back of her vocorder. "Apart from a skirmish at the end of the pass the Decepticons were quiet and the Beast was preoccupied somewhere else," she reported dutifully.

Elita's mouth twitched in a wry smile. "That's not what I meant."

Triage chose that moment to throw his arms up with a loud, "Bah!" and stomping over to Elita and Roulette, effectively ending his shouting match with Molly.

He snapped out a salute once he'd left his noisy escort fuming with her arms crossed behind him. "Wrecker Triage, reporting as ordered." He said without the slight sarcasm she had expected from most of the mechs in Magnus' unit.

 _"A Wrecker with respect for authority,"_ Elita-One thought as she gave the mech a nod. _"Now there's a surprise."_

Triage pulled a containment case out of his subspace without anything further and held it out for her to inspect. The cylindrical tube had been blacked out and she could hear a faint ticking sound coming from inside, like whatever was inside was trying to find a way out.

"This is the sample from the Beast?" She asked, voice low as she leaned forward in her chair, trying to find a crack in the tinting but unable to.

Triage gave a tight nod. "Yes sir," he said before his processor caught up with him and he added a stuttered, "er, ma'am."

Elita-One stood up and walked past him, motioning for him to follow. Roulette and Molly came behind him without having to ask. "Pick one Triage," Elita told him. She didn't really care if he called her sir or ma'am as long as he didn't switch back and forth like almost every mech still on Cybertron seemed to want to.

Triage only hesitated a nano-klik, just long enough for everyone to hear Molly's quiet snicker at his misstep. "Yessir!" he snapped, undoubtedly sending Molly a glare where Elita couldn't see. "I have two other samples with me, but this one is the most...lively."

Elita looked over her shoulder just in time to see Molly lean almost comically away from the ticking case. "You mean there's something _alive_ on there?" She demanded, voice rising in pitch.

Triage rolled his optics to the ceiling. "They are all, technically, _alive_ femmeling. Each case has an active stimulant field to keep the samples from decaying-"

" _Gross!_ " Molly gagged.

Triage ignored her. "-otherwise we wouldn't be able to learn as much from them. The Beast is, after all, alive and any weaknesses we find in the smaller tissue should lead us to ways to destroy the creature as a whole."

Molly shot him a look that clearly said he was nuts. "It's still gross," she muttered, and then hung back to walk with Roulette, who had moved a safe distance away as soon as the word 'lively' had passed through Triage's vocal processor.

They walked briskly through the winding halls of the femme base with no further conversation, always heading down deeper into the earth. Before the femmes had moved in, this place had been a refuge for a group of Neutrals led by the young femme Dovetail, a good friend of Elita's. Before that it had been an underground parking structure for bots in alt-mode that needed to kill some time in shade and pleasant company. Signs of both inhabitants still remained, shoved into corners to make room for the femmes' equipment. Personal effects left behind in recharge quarters when the Neutrals had left too fast to take them with them. Tables and stools in the mess hall that had been taken from the shelled out remains of an energon cafe that had been too close to the surface of the parking structure.

The deeper they went the less signs there were of former life. By the time they reached the medical level Alpha Trion had taken over, all evidence of the Neutrals and life before the war had vanished entirely.

Elita-One stepped through the doors into the permanent cold of the medbay, the others following behind her. She expected the room to be empty except for Alpha Trion and the catatonic Wheeljack, but when she caught a glimpse of sea-green armor in between the curtains hung around Wheeljack for privacy, she wasn't exactly surprised.

Without a word, Molly made a beeline for the curtain and moved it aside just enough for her to see in, her brown and green frame blocking Wheeljack and Moonracer from anyone else's sight. Elita barely caught the murmured, "Hey Luna, how you holding up?" before Molly disappeared behind the shroud entirely.

Elita-One felt a tightness in her chest ease slightly. Molly may be difficult to handle at times, but she was still glad the femme had appeared on their doorstep not long after the _Ark_ had gone searching for the AllSpark. She was roughly the same age as the seven younglings (though Arcee and the others weren't such younglings anymore, Elita reminded herself) but unlike them Molly had been sparked by creators – a bonded couple that had met shortly after the war really got started. She was a good girl – if not overly headstrong – and a good friend, especially to Arcee and Moonracer who were closest to her age.

 _"Moonracer needs a good friend right now."_

Seeing Triage's curiosity at Molly's sudden disappearance, Elita kept walking. "Alpha Trion should be back in his office," she told him, offering no hints about what was going on behind the curtain. "He's very interested to see a piece of Shockwave's creature up close. We haven't been able to get a decent sample ourselves."

Triage snorted. "No surprise there," he muttered. "The monstrosity took out two teams when we first discovered it. Only reason we got _this_ -" He hefted the case and patted its tinted side, eliciting an angry tick from whatever was moving around inside. "-is because it just...fell off."

Elita was too intent on finding a way to destroy the Beast to feel revulsion as Triage kept talking. "Nothing we've tried has even left a dent. Even that planetary defense cannon Percy put back together for us before he took off with Prime and the others. At least you gals are smart enough to get out of its way when it comes around."

Elita frowned as she keyed open the door to Alpha Trion's private work space. It wasn't any kind of higher intelligence that forced them to hide when the Beast got too close; it was self-preservation, pure and simple.

"Yes, well," she mumbled as the door lock disengaged and she led the way through, "hopefully that will change now that we can see what it's made of."

Triage snorted at the mention of hope, but didn't say anything to contradict her. Roulette's poker face remained as impassive as always.

The old Archivist was inside, tending to his machines. They were all non-sentient of course – mostly equipment although a few pre-war odds and ends were scattered about as well – but he continued to talk to them like they could understand. Elita liked to think of them as his pets that kept him company as he worked on repairing and maintaining their internal circuitry.

Currently Alpha Trion had his head buried in what had been a street sweeper in a former life, fixing it or using it for spare parts Elita couldn't tell.

"-and then I said, 'Well of course the mirror's broken. You're too fat to fit in it anymore!' And then he hit me. I've still no idea why."

He was too preoccupied to notice when Elita-One stopped next to him, much less see her lean over and murmur, "Maybe because it wasn't a mech you were talking to?"

Alpha Trion jumped at the sudden appearance of her voice and crashed his head loudly against the inside of the street sweeper's plating. "Youch!" he shouted, the sound muffled by the metal box he was still crammed into. Elita watched with a small smile as he tried to pull himself out only to end up smacking his head into something else and grumbling a handful of ancient swears.

His narrow face was scrunched into a frown when he finally managed to free himself, but it softened when he saw her. "Oh Elita," he mumbled, "it's only you."

Elita nodded. "Only me," she repeated, her spark warming slightly at the sight of the bedraggled old mech. Even knowing Alpha Trion was more than capable of taking care of himself, Elita did her best to look after him. She was only a Well-spark herself, but Alpha Trion was to closest thing she had found to a mech guardian.

It hadn't always been like that. Before he'd just been Orion's mentor – the well-known, solitary Archivist that protected Cybertron's history as well as maintained the planet's data net – but their relationship had changed after she'd become Elita-One. Elita thought it had something to do with the frame he'd given her. She'd been fatally damaged as the simple femme Ariel during an energon raid. Her spark had barely survived but her frame was so badly damaged that her light _would_ go out if nothing changed. There hadn't been time to make a new frame for her from scratch so he must have already had this frame in storage. Why Elita had never been able to figure out, but it must have been very special for him to have kept it for so long.

Elita looked down at her vambrace, tarnished and scratched from multiple encounters with Decepticons. The rosy-pink color had faded away in places, revealing protoform silver underneath. It had been sunflower yellow when Trion had placed her spark in it.

Roulette cleared her vocal processor behind them, reminding Elita of her and Triage's presence. And why they were here in the first place.

She looked up with a shake of her head. Now was no time for reminiscing. "We have the Beast sample for you Alpha Trion." She told the old mech, gesturing towards the case Triage still held. "Where do you want it?"

Alpha Trion leaned around Elita to get a better look at the containment case. Maybe it was just the way the flight reflected against the mech's optics, but Elita thought she saw them gleam with almost ruthless curiosity as he caught sight of the case.

He straightened and the gleam was gone, but not the intense look on his face plates. He raised an arm and quickly pointed at his clean work table before closing the hatch of the street sweeper and started to collect his tools. "Over there," he told Triage already distracted as his optics swept over the cluttered room for what he'd need. "Put it over there."

Triage did, a grim look on his own face as Roulette hung back, making sure she was out of the way of Trion as he went about picking things up. Elita folded her arms over her chest and watched them all from where she stood, only going to stand by the table when it was clear Alpha Trion had everything he thought he would need.

"So," the mech murmured as he placed the container in the center of his table and flicked on the isolation field directly above it, "let's see what this Beast is made of, shall we?"

Precautions in place, Alpha Trion deactivated the container's tinting. They all leaned as close to the field as they could, eager to get an up close look at the Beast that hunted them.

Roulette's lips twisted in revulsion. "It looks like...a glob of frame mesh." She muttered.

"No look," Elita pointed at the far end of the sample, "it has a head."

It did, as well as what looked like half formed wings as well as legs that were only developed on one side.

"It doesn't really look like a piece of anything." Roulette said, leaning back again. "It looks more like an underdeveloped insecticon. Maybe it's a parasite?" She guessed, looking at the others.

Triage watched the thing as it tried to crawl along the side of the container, its legs working in a haphazard fashion that nevertheless let it hobble along the glass like a toy that had been stepped on and bent out of its proper shape. "I did wonder about that." He told them, never taking his optics off the misshapen creature. "And it _would_ explain why it just fell off. However Top Spin was quite clear that it didn't just fall. It more..." a small crease appeared at the corner of his mouth, the only sign of his disgust, "sloughed off. Like dead organic skin."

"So..." Roulette hummed uncertainly, "not a parasite then?"

Triage shook his head. "Probably not."

"We might get a more definitive answer to that question once we know what this thing feeds on," Alpha Trion muttered as he bent closer, magnifying the zoom on the round eyepieces he'd placed over his optics. A small red light shone steadily at the side of his head and Elita realized he was recording his studies.

 _"Only makes sense,"_ Elita thought grimly as she leaned away from the isolation field. Across from her, Alpha Trion pressed a button on the top of the container.

The reinforced glass snapped open like it was spring loaded and the mutated parasite leapt out with enough force to startle Roulette off to Elita's side.

The mutated blob slammed into the isolation field, making it fizzle and crack as energy kept the thing inside. Alpha Trion watched intently through the electric sparks, his special goggles canceling out the bright light that left after images on Elita's optic circuitry.

"Fascinating..." he mumbled, leaning closer.

The insecticon-shaped experiment threw itself against the isolation fields twice more before giving up. It crawled along the bottom of the table around the cylinder it had just left. Elita watched as it traced the edge of the isolation field, occasionally prodding it with feeble legs as if testing for any gaps. When it reached the far side of the field – only half way around from where it had started – it stopped and turned back, bent wing-like appendages fluttering irritably against its pitted back.

Elita flinched at the sound, though the wings themselves created only a slight buzz. "Does anyone else hear that?" she asked, pressing a hand to her audio to try and keep out the sound.

Roulette and Triage looked at her. "No," Triage stated simply as Roulette added, "What sound?"

Elita grimaced. This wasn't the first time she'd heard or seen something no one else could, but mostly her extra-sensory perceptions were spark-feelings or visions of things that sometimes happened later. Sounds that scraped against her sanity had never been a part of the package before.

"It's like a...humming sound," she told them. "Just on the edge of my hearing range."

Triage returned his attention to Alpha Trion's procedure in an effort to keep his thoughts on this matter to himself, but Roulette shuttered her optics and listened. She was more used to Elita's gifts, like most of the older femmes around here were.

But when she opened her optics again Elita knew she still hadn't heard it. "I'm afraid not Prima."

Elita shot her a sideways glance at the slip in a title that she still felt she had no right to. But what could she do? Beta – the oldest femme functioning and therefore the rightful leader of the femme community – had given it to her after she'd climbed to the rank of commander.

Roulette looked away, but made no apology for what she'd said, leaving Elita with a flat look on her faceplates. The rest of the femmes – including her own sisters Chromia and Arcee – had had an easier time accepting the change than Elita had. She would have found it ironically funny if it hadn't happened to her.

"I don't hear it either, however..." Alpha Trion trailed off as he reached up an aged hand and adjusted one of the large knobs near his audio. "Ah! There it is!" he cried quietly as the tiny insecticon-like creature reached the end of its pacing line and turned around again once more.

"There is a sound?" Triage asked with a frown. "I watched the frequencies as I worked with the sample, but it did not emit any noises."

Alpha Trion cracked a grin as he adjusted the settings on his observation lenses. "You mean it did not make any noise when _you_ were studying it, because it sure if sending up a racket now."

Triage frowned deeper and shifted his weight uneasily. "Something must have changed..." he muttered.

"Why does it only stay in this part of the field?" Roulette asked, a trace of anxiety entering her voice and optics as she eyed the twitching creature that insisted on tracing the edge of the isolation field right in front of her.

"I'm not sure..." Alpha Trion mumbled. "Did it do this when you observed it, Triage?"

The other mech shook his head and crossed his arms over his broad chest. "No. It hardly moved. In fact it was quite tame when they first brought it to me. It only became agitated when we arrived here."

"Hmm," Trion hummed. "Curious."

Elita rubbed at her temple with a digit. The noise was starting to hurt her head. "Perhaps it has to do with the same reason it insists on making this noise," she muttered.

"Maybe it's calling for help," Roulette suggested. "If I was alone and being experimented on that's what I would do."

Elita frowned in thought. The noise was growing louder. "Maybe- _!"_

She hissed as the noise suddenly spiked from an annoying buzz to an incessant shrill pitch that stabbed at the spot just behind her optics. Elita-One pressed her fingers to her optics to try and relieve the pressure building up behind them as the sound filled her head. Dimly she heard Roulette speaking to her, asking what was wrong-

And then a mech started screaming outside.


	5. The Voices Inside

Hey guys, sorry to leave you hanging so long. Stuff happened, most of it boring, although the one bright spot is that my original story, Life on the Hybridian Way, which you may have read about in my profile, won 3rd Place in a science fiction contest hosted on Inkitt. Woo! Feel free to check it out (link in my profile).

Here is what you came for though; the next chapter! I hope you like it. :) And of course, thank you for such lovely reviews! I'm sorry to have left you in suspense for so long.

...

Across the Bounding Interstellar Waves

5 – The Voices Inside – 5

* * *

"It is sometimes an appropriate response to reality to go insane."

― Philip K. Dick

* * *

Moonracer wasn't sure what had happened. One minute she'd been talking with Molly in a quiet voice so as not to wake Wheeljack out of his fitful recharge and the next-

"Moonracer, are you all right?"

Moonracer dimly heard Molly's concerned shouting through the hoarse scream filling her audios. The room looked different than before. Taller somehow...

" _Luna can you hear me!"_

Molly was frantic now. And there was a clanging nearby, like Ratchet throwing things when the twins pushed him too far.

Moonracer shook her head to try and clear the clanging out of her audios, but it only grew louder. She looked up to see what was giving off the racket, but only saw an empty circuit slab above her head.

She was on the floor, she suddenly realized. She had been knocked right off her stool when Wheeljack started thrashing on his circuit slab. From the sounds up above he was still thrashing.

Moonracer scrambled to her feet, using the slab bolted to the wall to haul herself up. Wheeljack was screaming, his voice hoarse and whiting out with static around the edges when the sound strained his damaged vocorder. She didn't know what had set him off, but it was clear he wasn't about to let it go.

Molly had one of Wheeljack's arms twisted up and behind his back to try and keep him from knocking her down, but she kept looking over at Moonracer in concern. "Fer spark's sake, Trion! Trion where are you?" She shouted as loud as she could as Moonracer struggled to her feet, one hand holding her head. Molly swore again as Wheeljack's elbow rammed into her side as he fought her blindly. "We could use some help over here!" she bellowed.

Auditors still ringing from her fall, Moonracer reached towards Wheeljack across the circuit slab. "Jackie," she tried to speak, "tell me what's wrong-"

Wheeljack swung wildly and managed to free his arm, sending the smaller Molly flying into the nearby wall. She bounced and slammed into the floor, not quite able to catch herself before she struck.

Moonracer watched in a daze. She'd never seen Wheeljack act like this, even surrounded by Decepticons. He was like a wild predacon and Moonracer didn't know how to help him.

With a growl, Molly came up off the floor and jumped onto Wheeljack's back. She locked a forearm against his throat in a choke hold as he swung her around, trying to throw her off again.

Molly was scowling at Luna. "Don't just stand there!" she hollered as Wheeljack pried at her arms. "Get the doc!"

Room still spinning at the edges, Moonracer stumbled out of the curtained off area looking for Alpha Trion. She tripped over the corner of a cart and would have gone somersaulting over it if someone hadn't grabbed the back of her collar and hauled her back.

Dazed and more than a little confused by now, Moonracer looked over to see the scowling face of a Wrecker staring at her. "What the frack's going on in here?" he demanded irritably. Moonracer immediately wanted to call him 'Small Ratchet'.

She tried to shake her head to tell him she wasn't sure, but that just made the room twist sideways and she immediately stopped.

"I don't know," she told him as she held her head with both hands. "He was recharging and then he just started screaming-"

The Wrecker put her back on her feet before ripping back the curtain. Wheeljack was still trying to pry off Molly, but the femme was nothing if not tenacious and she held on.

"A little help would be nice!" she shouted as she hung on, her words chopped up from the effort.

The Wrecker medic didn't hesitate. He charged forward, two fingers transforming into a standard syringe filled with electric blue liquid; a spark dampener that would put Wheeljack under for the next couple of hours.

He dodged a wild swing from the engineer and then ducked as Wheeljack finally got a hold of Molly and flung her bodily in the Wrecker's direction. Elita caught Molly and kept her from being flattened into the nearest wall, but was forced to her knees as the smaller femme barreled into her chest.

The medbay was still filled with the awful sound of Wheeljack's bellowing and as Moonracer watched, he put both of his hands to his head like he was trying to block out an awful sound of his own, but she couldn't hear anything else.

The Wrecker jabbed the syringe into the muscle cable showing between a hole in the other mech's armor and gave him all the dampener he had.

The effect was almost instantaneous. Wheeljack's hoarse shout died into a pained moan; he swayed on his feet, his optics going glassy, and then finally he fell backwards into the waiting arms of the medic, who caught him as he fell and kept him from doing any more harm to himself.

Moonracer watched it all with her spark burning in her core. Primus, she was so useless. She should have done something; said something to make him calm down. But she had already said everything she could think of and it had all washed over him like water off of a new wax job.

" _Owww_..." Molly's whine broke the sudden silence. Moonracer looked around, remembering the other femmes were there, and saw her friend had a hand to her helm.

The femme with the camouflage paintjob shook her head as she climbed to her feet, Elita-One pushing herself up next to her. "Yeesh, what got into him?"

Elita-One's optics narrowed. "Precisely what I'd like to know," she murmured. Moonracer cringed when those optics fell on her. "Tell me what happened, Moonracer. What changed?"

Moonracer tried to remember quickly, her optics darting from one spot of floor to another. "I-I don't know," she finally whispered. "One minute Molly and I were talking, and then the next..."

She gestured hopelessly, coolant tears welling up in her optics. "Then the next, he just started screaming and thrashing around at anything that moved. It was like, like he thought we were trying to kill him."

Her vocal processor degraded into white noise and she had to stop. Molly laid a hand on her shoulder, but didn't say anything. Not to Moonracer at any rate.

"It's true," she told the femme commander, looking her square in the optic. "If something did set him off, it wasn't from us."

Elita looked over at the mech. "Triage?" she asked, voice low but firm.

The Wrecker medic hummed and scratched at the side of his face plating. "Well, there's always the outside chance that Shockwave got some kind of chip in him that he's still controlling. Some kind of pain manipulator or spark disrupter..."

Moonracer let out a strangled sob and put a hand over her mouth to keep the rest inside.

Elita-One frowned at the Wrecker. "That is not good news, Triage," she muttered, as if he had upset Luna on purpose.

Triage's optics darted to the sea-green femme in something that was almost concern before he continued on. "Alpha Trion swept him for such devices of course, but this _is_ Shockwave we're talking about. If any mech can find a way to fool sensors, it's him."

No one debated his point, although Moonracer shook a little harder.

"However," he added quickly, "the simplest explanation would be that _we_ did something that, in his already damaged state, induced the fit." He looked over at Molly and Moonracer. "You said he was completely calm when you were talking?"

Molly nodded and Moonracer managed, "He was recharging."

Triage nodded sharply and then with a few taps of his digits brought up the readouts from Wheeljack's circuit slab. Even looking at the holo-projection backwards, Moonracer saw that the readings were quite level until a jagged spike cut the screen, followed by more ragged lines before suddenly going flat when Wheeljack finally managed to tear out the feed lines that connected him to the slab.

Triage studied them with stern optics, his mouth angled in a downward slant as he took in the readings. "Yes, there's nothing here to suggest he was in some inner turmoil before coming back online. No signs of seizures or system failure."

Moonracer's spark casing relaxed just a fraction. Well at least there was that.

"Although it appears that whatever is affecting his behavior is still activated." Triage pointed to the new data coming from the circuit slab Wheeljack was resting on. "Look, it's almost like he's experiencing a prolonged memory tremor."

Moonracer looked over at the mech. He was still unconscious, but he was frowning even in his sleep and his feet kept twitching like he was trying to run from something.

Moonracer looked away. Her spark hurt, almost to the point of numbness now. She hadn't slept well and she doubted she would for the foreseeable future.

Elita-One had absorbed Triage's explanation. "Could his behavior have anything to do with the specimen you brought back?" she asked with a careful look at the younger femmes that Moonracer missed altogether.

"A very perceptive question, Elita-One," an aging voice answered her.

The Autobots turned as Alpha Trion approached them. He had a large glass case in his hands and something inside it was buzzing vehemently. Moonracer watched in a mix of frightened curiosity as the thing in the glass case flapped and stumbled around its enclosure like a drunken bug.

"What _is_ that?" Molly asked in obvious revulsion, echoing Moonracer's sentiments.

Triage blew out through his vents and lowered his arm after deactivating the circuit slab projection. "A specimen of the Beast. We hoped that by studying it, we could find a weakness to bring the thing down."

"Yes," Alpha Trion murmured as he reached up to the top of the cage, "and it appears right now it's telling us something quite unusual."

Moonracer looked over to see what he was talking about. The glob-like specimen had stopped stumbling around its glass cage and was tapping at the glass with thin, ragged appendages. It seemed to be staring at something outside, and when she followed its line of sight, she found Wheeljack moaning on his circuit slab.

Her spark pulsed harder. "What does it mean?" Moonracer demanded. "What does it want with him?"

"I don't know." Alpha Trion told her calmly. As he came closer, Wheeljack fought harder in his unconscious state. He was mumbling now and fighting against the magnetic restraints Triage had locked around his arms and legs.

Molly was too busy peering at the sample to notice. "It doesn't really look like a Beast..." she muttered, leaning down and tapping the glass to get a closer look. "It looks more like a bug."

Whatever it was, it didn't appreciate her tapping, and it threw itself at the glass in front of her face. Molly jerked back, startled, and then frowned at the thing as it continued to vibrate menacingly at her.

"Can't you just squash it and study it after?" she asked.

Triage gasped. "No!" he shouted. "We'll learn the most about it if we study it while it's _alive_. I mean look at that!" He flung a hand out at the buzzing lump of metal mesh. "If it was deactivated we would never have known that it makes that sound. And it's likely that we won't find out how or why if we removed whatever life is left in it."

Moonracer hardly heard him. Wheeljack was mumbling as he fought now.

"Wheeljack?" she murmured as she placed a hand on his chest, over his spark. "What is it?"

He froze a brief nano-klik at her touch, and then jerked at the restraints. Moonracer flinched, but didn't leave. She could almost make out what he was saying.

"-away."She finally heard. "Keep them away."

Moonracer frowned. _Them?_

She looked over at the specimen behind the glass, a suspicion growing in her processor.

"How can it be alive if it's just a part of the Beast?" she finally asked.

The conversation behind her stopped. "Because it's not actually alive like one of us," Triage answered her, "but even as just a small section of the whole, it contains enough energy to power its cell structure even now. That's what I meant."

As she watched Wheeljack struggle and mumble to himself, Moonracer wasn't convinced. "But what if you're wrong?" she asked him, finally turning around to face the other Autobots. "What if it isn't a part of a whole? What if the reason it's functioning on its own is because that's how it was originally meant to live?"

Elita-One frowned. "What do you mean Moonracer?"

Moonracer pointed at the specimen in the glass case. "Look at it," she told them. "Those six uneven appendages are legs. It's got wings half welded to its body and those little stick things? I think they're antenna." And then when they still gave her matching blank looks, she told them, "It's not a piece of a Beast. It's a malformed insecticon."

That brought some optic ridges up. They all turned to look at the vibrating specimen, only now seeing the strong resemblance it bore to the insecticons. A half-melted, monster of an insecticon, yes, but still an insecticon.

"Ohhh..." Molly said slowly. "Okay, I can see it now."

From the grim looks on their faces, the others saw it too. "Shockwave has been experimenting on insecticons," Roulette mumbled.

Molly was looking between all the adults' faces. "But what's this got to do with the Beast? Are they like, parasites or something? Feeding off whatever garbage collects on its armor?"

"We've been operating under the assumption that the Beast is a single entity," Alpha Trion spoke gravely, thumb and forefinger stroking his long beard in thought, "but what if it isn't? What if it is, in fact, many little beasts squeezed together to form a larger, unstoppable being? One that could communicate and act as a whole."

"Like some kind of hive monster?" Roulette asked, skepticism all over her face plates.

"It makes sense," Triage murmured as he began to nod slowly. "We thought our weapons were ineffective because even when we made a direct hit, the Beast just kept coming. But what if we _did_ kill one - or two or five - but it just wasn't enough to matter? Because no matter how many we killed, there were always more to take their places."

"Which means it's not a beast," Elita finally realized, optics narrowing, "it's a _swarm_."

Alpha Trion nodded slowly. "Made out of Shockwave's mutated insecticon army."

They were all silent for a long cycle. Even Wheeljack's pained moaning had quieted to whimpers.

"That's disgusting," Roulette finally muttered, looking no less disturbed than before.

Molly giggled to herself, amused if not slightly hysterical. "It's a great, big, buggy Frankenstein's monster," she chirped, optics glowing over-bright. She'd always had an interest in monster stories, but even now Elita could see the anxiety hiding in her large optics.

The mutated insecticon was still buzzing, its deformed wings fluttering in spastic bursts. The noise was grating on Moonracer's processor.

"Can you please shut that thing up?" she snapped.

Alpha Trion blinked at her, surprised by her request, or maybe her temper. Moonracer didn't know and didn't really care. Her processor hurt from too much noise and too little rest. Come to think of it, she wasn't sure when she'd last refueled either.

Alpha Trion reached up and tapped a switch on the top of the case. A bright burst of blue energy shot through the cage, zapping the insecticon and flipping it onto its back, stunning it into submission.

Moonracer heaved a sigh of relief as silence followed. "Thank Primus..." she muttered. From the way Elita was rubbing at the side of her temple, she hadn't been the only one the noise had grated on.

"It is peculiar though," Alpha Trion said as he stared down at the insecticon. "If the insecticon was trying to communicate, who with?"

Molly's shoulders jerked a shrug. "More insecticons?" she hazarded a guess.

Roulette's optic ridges furrowed. "All the way down here?"

"I guess," Molly said. "I mean, they're bugs right? Who knows how many cracks in the framework there are around here. Some only big enough for bugs to fit through."

Moonracer tuned out Roulette's reply as she sank onto the edge of Wheeljack's circuit slab. She stared down at the floor with half-shut optics, unable to open them or close them all the way. She needed rest, probably energon. Maybe she should take that recharge inducer Alpha Trion had offered...

"Luna?"

Moonracer's spark threatened to stop, and then pulsed harder as she realized the voice hadn't been a product of her sleep-deprived processor.

She turned her head, afraid to hope it had really been him speaking to her...

Wheeljack was staring at her with dim optics. Not through her. _A_ _t her_.

"Wheeljack?" she breathed.

He stared at her for a long moment, the conversation dying behind them although neither bot noticed. Then he shuttered his optics in resignation. "Not real." He decided. "'s not real."

The smile that had been taking over her faceplates froze halfway at his words. "What?" She heard herself say. Then she grabbed his hand and held on tight. "Yes I am. Wheeljack, I'm _here_."

He still refused to un-shutter his optics. "No yur not," he muttered, sounding like he was talking to himself more than her. "Made you up. Yur'n head."

"'m not Jackie, I'm here. We're both here-" she tried.

"You are." His voice rose in volume as he became more agitated. "'s jus 'nother trick. Shockwave's trick," he tried to shout, but the words came out as a barely understandable rasp. "I c'n still hear bugs!"

"Bugs...?" Moonracer whispered. That's why he wouldn't believe she was real? He could still hear that thrice-slagged insecticon?

"You can _hear_ the Swarm?" The words were shocked right out of Molly's mouth.

"Are you a part of it?" Triage demanded.

Moonracer's optics glowed bright with indignation. "Wheeljack would never-!" she started only to be cut off by the Wrecker.

"Not on purpose," he told her, cutting her with his fierce gaze.

"Not part f'it." Wheeljack finally found the words. "But hear it. Create- creat'd it so hear it. Always _talking_ -" He got no farther.

Triage grabbed his shoulders and shook him. "You _created it_?"

 _"..._ numbers." Wheeljack moaned, withdrawing in on himself again. "Numbers ne'er lie..."

The frenzied buzzing appeared again, loud in her audios after the silence, and Wheeljack cringed as if the sound physically hurt him.

 _"Bugs..."_ Moonracer thought, unmoved from her place on the edge of the circuit slab. _"He thinks he's still in Shockwave's house of horrors because of that bug..."_

Moonracer wasn't sure what came over her then. It was like she was watching her body from a distance, unable to control herself. She got to her feet and walked away from Wheeljack. And then before anyone else knew what she was doing, she jammed her digits down on the button on the top of the insecticon's cage. The electric current shot out and wrapped around the bug, jolting it. But this time it didn't deactivate.

"What are you doing?" Triage shouted, grabbing her arm to pull her back as Alpha Trion tried to bring the cage out of her reach. But she kept her fingers on the button, refusing to let go. This was all Shockwave's fault. Him and his dang, blasted, Primus-forsaken experiments...

It was making some kind of noise, one she couldn't hear, but from the pained faces of Elita-One and the way Wheeljack's engine started to give off a stressed, high pitched whine, they obviously could. Moonracer was sorry their heads were hurting, but that would stop as soon as the bug was dead.

Triage grabbed her upper arm and yanked her back. The charge stopped without Moonracer's finger on the button, but the damage was done. The malformed bug twitched sporadically as blue lines of energy crawled along its mutated frame. Then it stopped moving altogether.

Roulette and Molly seemed stunned and Elita was shaking her head, whether at her or just to clear it, Moonracer couldn't tell. Triage was livid, of course, but Alpha Trion looked more disappointed than anything.

None of their reactions mattered to her though. Only one did, and Moonracer turned around to see Wheeljack staring up at the ceiling in a state of shock. Not out of any pain the insecticon's noise had caused him, but at the sudden and abrupt lack of any buggy buzzing at all. His cooling vents were working too hard and without the hum of the insecticon in her audios, the white noise coming from his vocorder rasped loud against the quiet.

She walked back over and put her hand over his. His optics didn't move away from the ceiling over his head, but they were a little brighter than before.

"Believe I'm real yet?" she whispered, barely hiding the white noise in her own vocal processor.

He still wouldn't look at her, and Moonracer wasn't sure if that was because he was still in a state of shock or because he was returning to his previous catatonic state of mind.

"Wheeljack?" she whispered, afraid.

He blinked, but his face didn't change. And then to Moonracer's utter relief, his fingers tightened around hers in a weak squeeze.


	6. Hive Minded

Hey guys! I hope you had a good Valentine's Day yesterday. I thought about putting this up then...but I didn't want to make anyone run for the comfort ice cream given the overall mood of the story so far. n_n; Oh! I also found the most Shockwave-iest quote to exist in the world. Read it. It's perfect, right? :)

Thank you Nighthawk for your awesome reviews! I've been bad about responding to you (or anyone else for that matter) but I hope you know how much I appreciate hearing from you and I'm so glad you're enjoying my story! Wheeljack is my favorite G1 mech ever, and he and Moonracer are my favorite headcanon pairing, so I'm really happy other people love him/them too. :3

Right, love you all! I hope to hear from you guys, and that you all have a fantastic week! :)

...

Across the Bounding Interstellar Waves

6 – Hive Minded – 6

* * *

"A mind all logic is like a knife all blade. It makes the hand bleed that uses it." - Rabindranath Tagore

* * *

Shockwave entered his workspace as he had every orbit since Megatron had left, taking off on the fool's errand of finding the AllSpark and leaving his chief scientist alone with all the real power.

And Shockwave had no doubt that's what Megatron had done, his vision was simply too clouded by dark energon and the sight of Optimus Prime's head unit separated from the rest of his frame for the Decepticon Commander to realize this as his scientist had. Megatron had left the real power behind him when he'd gone after a mere symbol of everything he thought he wanted.

And if Megatron could not see that now, Shockwave surmised that he never would.

The remaining Decepticon officer pondered all of this idly where he stood in what his remaining subordinates called his 'office'. The room itself had once been nothing but a simple elevator, but after his expansion and various modifications, he had transformed it into a mobile observation platform. A smaller circular wall – beyond it the pole the elevator rose and descended by – took up the center of the room and on its surface Shockwave had mounted five monitors so he could view outer Cybertron himself without having the information degraded by repetition from mouth to mouth before it finally reached him.

But it was the outer wall that held his attention today. Made of the strongest plastic ever fashioned in the industrial halls of Kaon, it was completely see-through without any scratches or windowpanes to break his three-sixty view. At first there was nothing to see as the observation room descended into the complex of old laboratories that had been built in a narrow line directly underneath Crystal City, but after a cycle of silence, the black foundation metal was replaced by several rooms.

They ringed him on all sides, five in total, each one holding a different experiment he was currently conducting. The subjects here – both captured Autobots and disappointing Decepticons – had been with him a long time. For most this was not their first experiment with Shockwave and even knowing they were only fifty feet away from the surface and possible freedom, none of them would dare risk the trip. They were dead at spark, if not in body, and by his constant testing and trying and recasting, Shockwave had ground out of them the will to function.

He took no pleasure in this, not like Megatron or Starscream would have, but there was no disgust or revulsion either, at them or himself. Shockwave had been removed from such trivial emotions long ago and now there remained only apathy. Apathy and the endless desire to _know_.

Shockwave cast a critical eye over each of his experiments, making notes to be written down and organized later as the observation room descended at a leisurely pace, giving him ample time to see before another strip of black ground appeared, separating his experiments from the rooms below. Here the occupants had a little more life in them. They fought, either fidgeting constantly or every few cycles in stronger bursts, against restraints or their test's administrators or even at times against each other. But it never lasted. Their wills might still push them forward, but their frames were weak and soon failed them, leaving them to suffer in silence.

The next level was characterized by its noise. True, no sound made it past the transparent walls of the labs and the observation platform, but Shockwave still knew it was there. Mouths gaped in endless screams while bodies and processors were cut open and rearranged before being welded shut again. It was amazing how much they had still to learn about the Cybertronian framework and more was always revealed on a functioning subject than an deceased one. Shockwave had experienced some confusion during his first few times conducting this exploratory frame tests because the subject inevitably began to tell him things, anything from classified Autobot information down to more mundane personal secrets. It had taken him some months to realize they were hoping he would stop if they told him what they thought he wanted to know.

The fourth level was perhaps the most intriguing to Shockwave because it dealt with the subject that most eluded him; the mental/emotional leanings of the average Cybertronian.

Most of these experiments he had conducted before with different subjects so as to test a wider range of Cybertron, so instead of glancing at all of them, Shockwave chose the most interesting, what his subordinates had dubbed as the 'Sparkling's First Cleaning' test. The test room was sterile of course, the tile painfully white with its constant acid washings. The subject – a grizzled neutral mech unfortunate enough to be left behind after the Exodus – stood in the center of the room, hunched over the small 'sparkling' protected by his arms and shoulders from the acid spraying out of the nozzles in the ceiling. It wasn't a real sparkling of course – there were no more and Shockwave didn't believe that there ever would be again – but some tampering with the mech's central processor ensured that he would think the non-sentient dummy was in fact alive.

Shockwave watched, fascinated, as the mech took the brunt of the acid spray, the corrosive liquid forming small trenches in his armor as it ran down him in rivulets as he spoke to the test dummy. He was obviously in a great deal of pain, but he still refused to let go of the 'sparkling' and expose it to the acid, even to try and find a way to save himself.

It was a deeply fascinating experiment to Shockwave. He had conducted it numerous times on various mechs and femmes – Autobots, neutrals, even low ranking Decepticons so as not to bias the subject pool – and aside from four exceptions, the results had remained the same; the subject would rather protect what it perceived as the sparkling at the expense of itself even though their cranial scans had proven to Shockwave without doubt that their own survival instincts were in full working order.

He passed the interrogation levels and the one reserved for mental processing before bringing the platform to a stop. Unlike all the levels before this, Shockwave could make out nothing but blackness on the other side of the wall. It appeared that the room beyond was dark, but Shockwave knew better. He looked down and depressed a button on his control vambrace.

Immediately the darkness left the window, revealing the dim half-light within the room itself. Exposed to the light, the blackness separated and became a hoard of individual shadows, which then resolved itself into multi-legged, antennaed insecticons. Unlike the misshapen Swarm he'd expelled to the surface of Cybertron to hunt down the remaining Autobots, these were all properly shaped and had the correct number of wings, antenna, legs, and heads.

They were, however, just as dense, with no mind of their own and the collective intelligence of a turbo-fox.

Shockwave wasn't sure what to do with this second swarm, this Hive. The Swarm he had expected – insecticons had been extinct from Cybertron's surface for the past millennium and recreating extinct species from fossilized remains would always produce a rough batch before you saw any heartening results – and had made sure to have a purpose for them, but the ones before him...

They needed a guiding mind, one strong enough to take on the burden of ten thousand symbiotes but not so strong he would use it against Shockwave himself. Of course no suitable candidate had appeared and the mech had been on the verge of destroying them altogether when Deadlock had captured the Autobot's most famous engineer. After putting him through the usual interrogations, Shockwave had kept the mech and created a synthetic symbiote bond between him and the properly functioning Hive.

It had backfired spectacularly. In his haste to give the Hive a direction to follow, Shockwave had forgotten about their malformed cousins. Despite appearances, they were still one entity, still followed one mind. So when Wheeljack had been made leader of one, he'd inherited the other as well.

It had snapped what remained of his fragile mental state and instead of a broken-in Hive leader, Shockwave had been left with two groups of mindless insecticons and a gibbering idiot.

 _Perhaps not as much of an idiot as I thought however,_ Shockwave thought to himself as he watched the Hive mill around the room, seeking drone work but lacking any construction materials with which to build their nest. He'd removed it all after their first attempt had resulted in four walls and several cells, none of them actually attached to the others. _Even mad, he managed to escape my facility without help._ A tendril of anger twisted up out of his spark and then fizzled out when it found the firewalls surrounding his spark chamber. _Although the apathy of his guards played a greater role than a broken mech can realize._

The anger at the Decepticons' incompetence tried to rise again but was killed even quicker than before, helped by the fact that they were both paying for their inattention in energon.

Balance restored through brutal punishment, Shockwave returned his attention to the Hive. _Without direction they lack even the ability to create their own dwelling,_ Shockwave noted. _I thought perhaps a natural leader would emerge, given time, however as a whole they appear just as aimless as they were following their construction. I will allow another orn to observe any changes before destroying them and starting again._

Decision made, he watched as various groups of insecticons milled about the room, each either completely ignoring or going against the others around it. There was no order, no pattern, only random weaving in and out of the whole-

Shockwave stopped, single optic glowing brighter with piqued interest. There was a lull. A lull in the activity. One that he had seen on his arrival but had put down to random acts rather than actual avoidance, but that's what it was. The majority of the insecticons were _avoiding_ a certain part of the room. Why?

The mech sent more instructions through the vambrace and the room lights came up to full, scattering the insecticons further and riling them up so that the buzz of their wings must fill the room. Shockwave waited for the various groups to settle and saw with some surprise that the space they'd been avoiding was occupied.

Three of the insecticons filled the relatively empty space with a fourth lingering in their near vicinity. The fourth was one Shockwave had noticed before. With two undersized arms set below its helm line, the mech had very nearly culled it from the Hive entirely. The only reason it wasn't part of the Swarm right now could be put down to the mismatched armor plates covering its larger forearms. Shockwave hadn't given them to the insecticon – nor the grill that now covered its head except for the yellow optics as large as headlights – and he certainly hadn't given any instruction for the insecticon to paint them in a mix-match of yellow and Decepticon purple. But however the insecticon had gotten the plating, it had used them and made itself distinguishable from the rest of its Hive. At first Shockwave had hoped this was a sign of intelligence.

He'd quickly realized he was wrong. This insecticon in particular showed even less intelligence than the others and often got into scraps with its hive mates when it proved too stupid to get out of the way.

The three it was circling were an entirely different ball of moldable plastiform. They were standing on two legs instead of six and had recognizable frame features – one the tall straight wings of a jumper, another the heavy mandibles of a chewer extending above its head, and the third had a grill covering the lower half of its face, much like the fourth insecticon still circling their territory – the first Shockwave had ever seen out of the whole experiment. Each had covered themselves in the yellow and purple of the first, but the placement of the colors was specific, individual.

 _They are separating themselves from the others,_ Shockwave noted. _Like a cyber-cat creator distinguishing her kittens by color and various manes and alloys._ His optics narrowed as he considered. _If they have half as much intelligence as a femme cyber-cat they will not be easy to manipulate._

And, perhaps most importantly, unlike any insecticon Shockwave had spawned, all of their optics were red.

The scientist watched them, knowing for a fact that every insecticon – in both Hive and Swarm – had had yellow optics when he'd spawned them.

 _Perhaps this is a sign of higher cerebral paths becoming active in the cranial unit._ Shockwave hypothesized to himself. _Optic color is known to change depending on where a Cybertronian is in their lifecycle and I found no physiological reason why the insecticons would be different in that regard._

As he watched the trio through the glass, the hunched over fourth member started to encroach on their territory. It did not skitter like the more mundane members of the Hive, but crawled on its four strong appendages. It approached the others warily, ready to fight or run, but Shockwave didn't think either was its goal. It had seen the colors, the difference the other three had made on themselves – differences echoed less neatly in itself – and come to the conclusion that they were the same. From the way it approached, Shockwave believed it was after their acceptance.

He watched, not about to interfere, as the fourth insecticon registered on the other three's radar. They watched, antenna twitching at his presence as it closed the distance between them...

What happened next affected the coming future of more than one planet. Lives belonging to Transformers and humans alike were about to be altered for the worse. And as for the Wreckers and femmes, navigating Cybertron's broken landscape was about to become even more difficult.

The insecticon with the grill barring its mouth raised its hand to strike the interloper, but was stopped by a buzzing click from the chewer standing next to it. There was a moment of animalistic communication a mech like Shockwave was incapable of following, but in the end the grilled one lowered its arm and turned to a group of the Hive milling about nearby. There were five of them, ignoring the trio as if they didn't exist until they were addressed directly. Grill-face pointed sharply at the fourth insecticon, antenna twitching violently. For a moment the five Hive members only stared at him blankly.

And then they turned on the fourth insecticon, attacking with mandibles and pincers, driving the creature into the center of the room. It fought back, biting and screaming challenges, but that only upset other insecticons, drawing them into the fray until by the time he was in the middle of the cavernous room, the entire Hive was against him.

"Fascinating," Shockwave spoke into the silence as the scene became a black mound of violence at the room's center. Grill-face had given the base insecticons an order...and they had obeyed.

 _I will have to run further scans on the three to determine activity in the central processor, but this proves the appearance of a guiding Hive mind rather than disproves it. One that is now lacking in the Swarm._

If he could still feel annoyance he would have frowned. He hadn't broken the connection between Wheeljack and the Swarm because it had still proved useful to him in the long run. However with the engineer's mental break, often his control over the Swarm had proved useless. He'd still been capable of thought, but it was broken and erratic, driving the Swarm in corkscrew paths that just as often found dead areas as the populated ones Shockwave sought. The Decepticon Shockwave would have thought that perhaps the Autobot still maintained enough control to avoid his former comrades if he hadn't seen the brain scans himself. It was all random; his central processor too glitchy to hold onto any one thought. He wasn't sparing his friends so much as he was chasing butterfly-bots.

Beyond the observation window, the violence suddenly abated; the Hive returning to their original groups of five or six. Shockwave looked, expecting to see the dismantled remains of the fourth insecticon scattered around the floor, but found a dark hole punched through the floor plating instead.

 _It escaped,_ he realized. _Probably chewed through the plating when it realized its deactivation was near. No matter. It was faulty. I would have destroyed it if they didn't first._

He put the escaped insecticon out of his processor and turned form the window, calling up his Hive handler as he did.

"Yes, Lord Shockwave?" the mech answered promptly.

"I need you to remove three insecticons from the Hive immediately for scanning."

"Of course. What are their numbers?"

Shockwave repeated the long sequences without having to look. Undoubtedly the handler expected nothing more, but Shockwave had special instructions in this matter. "Do not collar them unless they prove reluctant to follow you and make special note of their Hive's reaction when you approach them."

"Erm, yes sir but...how do I separate them out without using the collars?"

Shockwave was continually amazed at his underlings' inability to think for themselves. "The simplest way," he answered as the observation room lowered so he could continue his inspection. "I want you to ask them to come with you."

...

Even half slagged, Wheeljack was having a hard time taking his optics off of Moonracer. At least, he was eighty percent sure it was really Moonracer. With the heavy feel of the magnetic cuffs restraining him, he was nineteen percent sure this was just another trick of Shockwave's. It had been a few years since the Decepticon had tried putting him through the emotional ring-around-the-rosy. Maybe Shockwave really did get bored like the rest of them?

And the last one percent...well there was always the chance that he had finally snapped and was unable to tell reality from delusion anymore.

But if this was a delusion, it was a dang good one. She looked almost exactly like he remembered her, only not quite. Her armor was more worn, the silver of her protoform showing around the edge of her soft green paintjob, and her face was harder then he remembered. She was watching him with fierce optics, his hands clenched into fists at her sides. She hadn't said anything else after offlining the larva insecticon and demanding to know if that was enough proof that she was real. Wheeljack hadn't given her an answer yet. To be honest, he wasn't sure _what_ was real anymore. Already the numbers were starting to dance around the edges of his vision.

 _So much for reprieve,_ he thought in the broken lines of thought that had been left to him.

But there were still little things that made him doubt the fact she was only in his head. He'd seen her many times during his time with Shockwave, but that had always been the optimistic, young femme he had caught staring his way from the other side of the mess hall, and she was always fuzzy around the edges, like a holo-projection or a recharge tremor fed by memory. This Moonracer was clearly older, spark refined through a fierce fire, and sharp as one of Ratchet's laser scalpels.

She also had a shallow dent around her left optic that was discolored by shadow, and given the restraints keeping him down, Wheeljack thought he had a good idea of who had given her the black eye.

He shuttered his optics and tested the restraints out of long habit. They were secure, but he hadn't really expected anything less. Shockwave had never been negligent and if he had attacked Moonracer, Elita-One wouldn't take the chance of letting him loose until she was sure he was back in his right processor. And Primus only knew how long _that_ could take.

"If-" he tried speaking normally only to have pain stab at his vocal processor. He cleared it forcibly. It felt like he had scoured it with sand.

He gave it a moment before trying again in a whisper. "If y'r- ya- _you're_ real," he had to think hard about what sounds he wanted his processor to vocalize, "then wer- _where_ are we? What...happen'd to me?"

Elita-One raised an optic ridge at him as she came to stand with Moonracer. Luna's hands were starting to shake, her angry resolve beginning to crumble. "You don't remember?" the femme commander asked, laying a hand on her friend's shoulder.

Wheeljack shuttered his optics again, remembering the sight of his energon spattered across the walls of his cell. He remembered plenty.

"Not how I got out," he clarified slowly, opening his optics as wide as he could.

Elita-One was as calm and collected as he remembered her. "I'm afraid we can't tell you that. Chromia and Arcee found you wandering the remains of Crystal City. We don't know how you escaped Shockwave and you've been in no state to tell us."

Wheeljack watched her, the information taking longer than it should have to sink into his processor. He was exhausted and hazy, floating in a state of constant pain. The good news was that it had leveled out into something close to bearable.

"I think," he tried to think, but it was difficult, "he had...a lab down there, under where...city used to be. I remember...old labs. All underground. He had a...a big elevator with glass walls so he could watch...experiments as he went up and down." Wheeljack had had his own fair share of time being on either side of that glass.

Dimly he heard a raspy, masculine voice confirming Wheeljack's theory; there _had_ been various scientific labs underneath the surface of Crystal City that the resident scientists had used before the war.

"What did they keep down there?" A young, feminine voice – younger than Moonracer or Arcee would be now – asked curiously.

"All sorts of things," the old mech answered her. "Crystal City was the largest, brightest, scientific community before the war. All of the major studies were taking place there, anything from early combiner experiments to dating tests of suspected remnants of the Quintesson and Thirteen eras."

Wheeljack was too worn out to pay attention, especially to something he already knew. He closed his optics, awareness shrinking to the feel of the cool circuit slab against his frame. The hum of non-sentient machinery was mercy on his audios, reminding him of his old work room in the outskirts of Iacon Southern Medical Complex where he and Ratchet had worked before the war. The smell of oil and steel combined with the sharp tang of medicine and disinfectant...

"Wait!" Someone put a hand on his arm and Wheeljack jerked, spark pounding as sharp pain lanced up to his shoulder. His vents wheezed as his cooling systems tried to keep up with his high frame-heat. At this rate he'd need cooling packs to keep his spark from overheating and reducing his spark chamber to slag.

Someone yanked the hand off his arm and the rush of cool air on his exposed frame felt too cold with his high heat. Without his armor, his protoform had been rubbed raw, open wounds marring the surface and exposing muscle cables that should have been hidden by several layers of mesh and metal.

He tried to speak, thank whoever had pulled the hand away or tell its owner to get the frack away, but all that came out was a wash of static. The numbers were spinning around his head again, unbalancing him further.

The aged voice reappeared. "I think we've reached out conversation limit for today," he said. Wheeljack couldn't tell if the mech was speaking softly or if it was his audios that were the problem. Either way his voice sounded faded and it was growing dimmer the longer he talked.

He barely heard the old mech say, "Put him under," before he dropped back into a sleep so deep even the numbers couldn't follow him.

...

Triage turned on Moonracer with a scowl as Alpha Trion saw to Wheeljack's next dose. "What do you think you're doing?" he demanded.

The smaller femme didn't flinch back. "I could ask you the same question," she hissed, hands balled into fists at her sides. "You were hurting him! And for what? So he wouldn't drop into a recharge cycle he obviously needs?" she demanded.

"A recharge cycle that could easily be his _last_ ," Triage shot back through a strained vocorder. "And a lot of good he'll do us then if his spark extinguishes before he gets a chance to tell us anything about this Swarm!"

Moonracer rocked back, vents hitching up sharply at Triage's words.

Behind her shoulder, Elita's optics flared. "Triage, you will get a hold of yourself," she told him sternly. "While Wheeljack is far from recovered, this _is_ improvement. Barring any more unwelcome surprises, I don't think he's going to offline overnight."

"I like to think his physician has more skill than that," Alpha Trion said as he synced the monitor readouts with the equipment set into his left vambrace. "And Elita-One is right. He is stable for the moment and his moment of lucidity is a good sign. Hopefully one that will be repeated the next time he wakes up."

Moonracer jolted like she'd been lightly stunned. "Hopefully?" she repeated the word as question. "Isn't he...back with us?"

Her words were thin and wispy with her fear and uncertainty. She so badly wanted this to be over.

Alpha Trion frowned, his broad, white optic ridges creasing low over his bright, blue optics. "It's hard to say for certain," he told her as he stroked his long beard in thought, "he's obviously been through a lot. I have only an idea of what mental strain he's been under this last stellar cycle. You destroying the mutated insecticon could have snapped him back into reality or..." He trailed off.

Moonracer's spark was pounding against its chamber. "Or?" Her cooling fans spun faster.

Alpha Trion vented a sigh. "Or it could have been a lucky chance and he'll simply sink back into his madness. Like I said, we'll know more when he wakes up again."

Moonracer looked spark-torn. Roulette paced over and wrapped an understanding arm around the sea-green femme's shoulders. "Shockwave had him a long time, dearest," she murmured in sisterly concern. "It'll take some time for him to return to himself, no matter what."

Moonracer nodded too quickly. "I know that-" she whispered, "I do, but-"

She couldn't finish. Shaking her head, she covered her face, unable to go on. Behind her, Molly shuffled over, her optics worried as she placed a hand on her friend's shoulder guard. She opened her mouth, and then stopped as she caught sight of Roulette shaking her head 'no' at her.

Molly hunched inward, biting her lip and looking away.

"Come on Luna," Roulette eventually murmured, gently pulling her away, "you've been down here since yesterday. Let's find you something to refuel with before you collapse."

Moonracer was too exhausted to argue, and she let the other femmes lead her away without protest.

Elita-One waited until the doors had closed behind them before turning and addressing Triage. "What was that?" she demanded, voice cooling several degrees.

Triage, optic ridges drawn in what Elita was beginning to think was a permanent frown, frowned more. "My concerns are perfectly valid-"

"Valid, yes." Elita cut in, her voice booming in a way it never had when she was simply Ariel. "But bringing them up so callously in front of the femme that has been _grieving_ his loss for the past stellar cycle was hardly the proper place to _air_ those concerns."

She met his gaze, not about to let him off the hook so easy. Triage for his part didn't look apologetic for anything he'd said, however he didn't shy away from her outrage either.

Elita thought that would be the end of it, but Triage was fearless if nothing else. "Coddling her won't help anybody," he told her quite loudly.

Elita-One's optics flared. She stopped halfway through her turn and pointedly turned back around. She planted herself in front of him and stared him down.

He recognized a commander's stare when he was on the wrong end of one and straightened to the attention only a mech like Ultra Magnus could drill into mechs.

"Do you know what Moonracer was doing the orbit before my sisters found Wheeljack wandering the Crystal Fields?"

Triage's faceplates shifted ever so slightly. Obviously he hadn't expected this turn in the conversation. "No," he answered.

"She was out there." She tilted her head to indicate the land east of their base. "On the ridge that lines the eastern edge of the Hydrax Plateau. And you know what's on the plateau itself, right?"

Triage finally looked away. He did.

"It's the Beast's usual hunting grounds. So many Cybertronians died in the Battle of the Hydrax Plateau that it's usually there devouring their innards and then picking its teeth with their struts. She was observing it, tracking its movements while my girls were scavenging energon. She followed it for over an hour, and then when it started to circle back towards the rest of the team, she left her cover and distracted it long enough for the rest of them to get out." She took a step forward, shrinking the space between them.

"She got its attention and _lived_." She prodded him in the chest plate. "How many Wreckers can even say that? Almost everyone it ever sees is having the energon sucked out of their veins within ten minutes. So no, I don't think she needs coddling. But someone she cares for deeply, someone she thought was _extinguished_ a week ago and might actually be tomorrow, needs her and she can't do anything for him. Moonracer is very brave, but she's not brave enough to face this alone. And she's not going to."

Her optics were so bright they burned into him as she stared unflinching into the Wrecker's faceplates.

"Do we have an understanding?" she asked, forcing her voice into a softness that he would have to work to hear.

"Yessir!" he snapped.

Elita-One leaned back, hands still clasped behind her back. "Good." The word was still sharp. Elita inclined her head to the door leading to Alpha Trion's lab. "Give Alpha Trion as much help as you can spare. I want to know everything we can learn about this Swarm-" She skewered Triage with still-furious optics. "-but not at Wheeljack's expense."

Triage saluted sharply. "Yessir!" His inflection was exactly the same as before, but Elita thought she saw a hidden gleam of professional insult. If nothing else, he took pride in his work.

 _At least he won't just leave Wheeljack to fizzle out,_ Elita thought as she dismissed Triage with a short word and turned her optics on the recharging engineer. Her optic ridges furrowed as she listened to the soft sounds of labored cooling vents.

 _I suppose I should be relieved,_ she thought to herself as she watched the mech twitch in his recharge. _This is the first honest recharge cycle he's dropped into since Chromia and Arcee brought him in. That's a good thing._

But as she looked down at Wheeljack's resting frame, even she could hear how hard she was trying to convince herself that was true.

Eventually she vented a sigh. "Luna is one of my closest friends, Wheeljack," she murmured to a mech that couldn't hear her, "and ever since Cybertron went dark I've had to watch her struggle with the realization that she was waiting for a mech that would never come back. And," she huffed a gentle laugh, "now by some miracle you have and that's wonderful. Just..."

She trailed off, small smile quickly fading away as she remembered how hard Moonracer had tried to hide her sadness from the rest of them. How hard she had clung to the hope he had survived, was only imprisoned somewhere, waiting for an Autobot to catch wind and a rescue party to appear. Remembered how, as the months dragged on, that hope had become fainter and fainter until it had faded entirely and Moonracer was left as a far cry of her former self. She never broke down, never bawled, but she was never the same either.

"Just don't make me watch her go through that again."

But Wheeljack could not have promised her she wouldn't, even if he'd been awake enough to answer.


	7. Storms of Madness

Hi readers, I'm so so sorry for dropping off the face of Fanfiction like that. Life got in the way of my best intentions. Anyway, I really hope you're all still interested, and that you'll enjoy this next chapter.

Thank you everyone who reviewed and favorited and alerted while I was gone! It was a bright spot in some pretty glum weeks. :)

* * *

Across Bounding Interstellar Waves

7 – Storms of Madness – 7

...

"He in his madness prays for storms, and dreams that storms will bring him peace."

― Mikhail Lermontov

...

When Wheeljack woke next, Moonracer was gone. He would have thought she was a recharge tremor after all – and a dang good one at that – but his surroundings still hadn't reverted back to his cell. The circuit slab was still cool and flat beneath his back. The walls around him were gray and clean. And, unfortunately, the static cuffs still held him at the wrists and ankles.

But they weren't primed as they had been before. And unless that changed, the only thing that would set them off would be a strong jerk against them, a motion he just didn't have the strength for.

 _"Is it real? Or is my mind just gone?"_

He lay there, quiet and still, as those two questions circled each other over and over, accompanied by the soft sound of old, but quietly functioning machinery. He thought from the soft sounds and the dim lighting that he must have awoken during the lunar cycle.

He faded in and out of coherent consciousness, but he thought it wasn't very long before the soft sounds of footsteps registered to his audios. He unshuttered his optics as much as he was able, and found himself looking up into a wizened ancient metal face.

For a pulse of his spark, he thought Solus Prime had come to lead his spark back to the Well, but then realized that even in her most unflattering images, she had never been portrayed with a wiry beard.

"So," the old mech – or perhaps very old, unfeminine femme – murmured when he saw Wheeljack watching him, "you're awake again. That's good, very good."

Wheeljack stared at the face, sure he had met it before. Yes, it had something to do with Optimus . . . no, something to do with one of Iacon's numerous libraries . . .

"Archivist." Wheeljack suddenly placed a name to the red-violet faceplates. "You're . . . the Archivist. Alpha Trion."

Alpha Trion nodded as he checked readouts and the sedative drip that ended in the fuel line conjunction at the inside of Wheeljack's elbow. The unit had run dry during the night and had gone un-replaced seeing as it was only Trion down here at this time of night. The old mech had sent Triage to his quarters, saying he was no use to anybot asleep on his feet.

"Yes." Alpha Trion confirmed his assumption as he took another case of blue fluid for the drip. "Your memory is improving. That's a good sign you know, given the state in which the femmes found you. I dare say you'll be back on your feet in no time at all."

'No time at all' probably had a different meaning to a mech that was older than grease itself. Wheeljack, med caste reject that he was, still knew it would be orns before he would be mended physically. As for mentally . . .

He tried not to think about that and suddenly he found he had plenty to occupy his mind. "What's . . . happened? Since Tyger Pax."

Alpha Trion's aged faceplates twisted downward in a grimace, his long beard twitching. "Much," he admitted as he stroked the white wires of his beard into semblance, "too much. Megatron has darkened all of Cybertron's energon supply. We survive on what we managed to scrounge before all the wells went dark, and what I can convince Vector Sigma to cleanse for me, though that is precious little. He always was a stubborn old derelict, even to me." He muttered that last part in equal parts mild amusement and irritation born out of a long held rivalry.

Wheeljack didn't understand half of what he meant. "Dark energon?" he muttered in what would have been horror if he hadn't been so exhausted. "And the Autobots? Prime? The others?" He was most afraid of this answer.

Alpha Trion shook his head. "Gone," he told him and for a nano-klik that lasted a lifecycle, Wheeljack felt his spark threaten to implode with grief before the old mech mercifully continued. "Left in search of the AllSpark. Most of the neutrals went through the space bridge with them, thank Primus. There is nothing left for them here."

Wheeljack relaxed against the circuit slab, relief turning his muscle cables back into gelatinous fluid. His friends were alive. Good. "And the femmes? Wreckers?"

The old mech nodded sharply, suddenly becoming tight lipped. "Will leave when it becomes necessary, I'm sure. But the timing is not quite right," he said, ancient digits moving to restart the drip.

Wheeljack felt the sedative almost as soon as it entered his systems. "No," he agreed, "still got . . . things to take care of."

He almost missed Alpha Trion's nod as recharge overtook him once more. "Yes, that we most certainly do."

...

It was some time later that Moonracer entered the medbay at a dead run. "What is it? What's going on?" she asked as she charged through the doors into the chilled underground air. She'd been in the mess hall with Molly and Arcee having her first decent amount of energon in the past orn, dreading that today would be just as bad as yesterday and the orbit before, when Triage's call had come through.

The Wrecker looked like he was at his wit's end. "I don't know," he said, scraping his palms along his helm as he watched something in a private room Moonracer couldn't see yet. What sounded like a metal storage cabinet fell over with a loud metallic crash and she approached a little faster. "I stopped his sedative drip to run some tests and he started-" he waved a hand spastically at whatever was causing the ruckus, "doing this!"

The femme came to a stop next to the frazzled medic and felt her mouth drop open in surprise when she saw the cyclone-force disaster going on in the other room.

Wheeljack was sitting in the center of it. He was surrounded by . . . Moonracer couldn't even tell what; wires and circuit boards and what she thought might have been a disemboweled control box to one of the circuit slabs. He had found a marker in one of the drawers and he was scrawling numbers and diagrams on every surface he could lay his hands on, including himself.

"What-" she mumbled, "-what is he doing?"

She felt the force of Triage's irritated scowl. "I don't know!" he repeated loudly. "Just make him stop!"

Moonracer took a half step forward, fully intending to go inside, and then jumped back when Wheeljack suddenly cried, "Yes!" and scrawled even more fervently on the tile floor next to him.

She gathered her courage again. "Wheeljack . . . ?" she said carefully as she took in the disaster area. "What . . . happened in here?"

Wheeljack glanced up at her, face obviously intent on his work, but he did a double take when he saw her. He'd only been under Triage and Alpha Trion's care for an orn and a half now, but already the effects were obvious. Framework had been patched, armor re-welded back into place. His spark pulse was steadier and his optics brighter. His processor, however, still fluctuated between reality and, well-

"Spanner!" he cried with a broad smile when he saw her. "There you are! We've been looking all over for you! Your creator's about to blow his helm."

Moonracer looked over at Triage, who shrugged. "If I knew what he was talking about I wouldn't have called you," the medic muttered before walking away entirely, leaving her to deal with Wheeljack on her own.

She hesitated, biting her lower lip, and then carefully made her way through the mess. "Jackie?" she tried gently, crouching down on the other side of the ring he had constructed around himself. "Whatcha doing here Jackie?"

"Astorian Theorem," he told her, "meant to calculate the amount of energon released upon a star's initial explosion. Stupid idea though. Dangerous. Highly explosive."

Moonracer blinked. "No wonder you like it then," she mumbled.

Wheeljack cackled, but didn't look up from the numbers he was busy scrawling on his newly replaced shin guard. He was writing feverishly and Moonracer's nasal passages caught the by now familiar scent of energon and lubricant leaks. "Jackie you're not well. You need to rest-"

He just kept muttering to himself, the numbers he wrote down not matching the ones pouring from his mouth. "X equals five times the speed of sound and the y-axis is the distance necessary to avoid the burn zone-"

He ran out of free space on the floor and began to use the toe of his boot instead. Moonracer hung her head. She didn't think he even realized.

"Okay, that's enough of that right now," she told him firmly, taking the marker away when it drifted within her reach.

"Aw . . ." Wheeljack muttered, like a disappointed youngling. Much to Moonracer's surprise, he gently prodded her in the side plating with his elbow. "What's the matter Span'? You used to be the fun one around here."

Moonracer felt her temper flare and she had to force herself to stay silent long enough to bring it back under control. "I'm not Spanner," she told Wheeljack for what felt like the hundredth time that orn. "It's Moonracer, Jackie. _Moonracer_."

But Wheeljack just stared at her with bright blue optics. She might as well have been speaking in the language of the Primes.

Moonracer vented a shaky sigh. "Just . . . tell me about the numbers Wheeljack. Numbers don't lie, right?"

His optics flared immediately. "Yes, yes!" he started scribbling again, nearly drawing her shin guard into his panorama of delirium. "Numbers are real! Numbers are truth!"

The mumblings died down after that and Moonracer sat there with him as he worked through the rest of his bout of insanity. _"He's getting better,"_ she reminded herself as she covered the floor with scrap material so clean-up would be easier later on. _"This doesn't happen as often so he is getting better."_

But it was a slow process. Wheeljack's moments of lucidity were coming more frequently, but they never lasted long and the madness that often took their place was spark breaking.

 _"Makes me glad Triage still keeps him under so much,"_ Moonracer thought with more than a trace of guilt. _"I'm not sure how much more of this I can take."_

The fact that he kept calling her Spanner wasn't making any of this easier.

She put the nagging questions back in an ever growing storage container in the back of her mind. "What's all this for anyway Wheeljack?" Moonracer asked instead, hoping he would give her an answer she could understand this time.

Unlike the first fifteen times she'd asked him, his answer was surprisingly short. "It's for the machine."

Moonracer frowned as she put down a few more sheets of writing metal before he could scrawl over the edge onto the floor again. "What machine?"

Wheeljack snorted a laugh as if she was joking, but when Moonracer only stared at him, he realized she wasn't kidding.

He sat up a little straighter. "Didn't I tell you?"

Moonracer shook her head, thinking non-verbal answers might be best.

His optics flared bright with repressed excitement. He even started to fidget in place like a small youngling. "I must have forgotten in all the excitement. Spanner," he put his hand over hers and Moonracer's spark shrank in her chest armor, "I got the most amazing offer. The Crystal City Natural Science Preservation Committee asked me, _me_ , to submit designs for a new enclosure they're building. Isn't that great?"

He was so excited about the prospect of working for a committee that hadn't existed since most of the members had been blackened during Starscream's final bombing of the city. Moonracer didn't want to disappoint him. "Yeah, that's wonderful Jackie."

But he wasn't done yet. "And – this is the best part – guess who asked me to do it. Go on, guess."

He inched closer to her, optics nearly white with his enthusiasm. With her chipped paint and scavenged armor plating, Moonracer felt grungy and outdated next to him. "I don't know," she sighed. "Tell me."

Wheeljack held up his hands as if preparing her. "I was asked...by _Shockwave_."

Red warning lights started to flash in Moonracer's processor. "Shockwave? Like, one red optic, death-to-all-lesser-beings Shockwave?"

He only heard half her words. He bobbed his head up and down like he had a loose spring in his neck. "I know! I mean, he's the mech that single handedly brought Crystal City out of the dark ages. And he picked _me_."

Optics overbright, Wheeljack threw himself back into his numbers. Moonracer sat next to him in shock. So that's how the glitch had convinced Wheeljack to work on his Swarm. He'd preyed on the delusion he'd helped create.

Moonracer laid a hand on Wheeljack's arm, trying to get his attention. "I need to go check on something Wheeljack. Stay here all right?"

Wheeljack nodded distractedly. "Sure thing Span'," he mumbled, optics intent on his work.

Putting aside her twinge of resentment, Moonracer stood and went to find Alpha Trion.

...

"You're quite right Moonracer," the old mech said not much later, "Shockwave could easily use these equations against us."

The three bots were standing on the other side of the window, looking in at Wheeljack stills scrawling on the floor in the isolation room. Moonracer's optics kept flicking between the engineer and Triage and Trion standing next to her. Both mechs were silent as they contemplated just what, exactly, Shockwave could do with Wheeljack's numbers.

Finally, Triage inclined his head at a diagram done in blue. "That looks like part of a stasis field."

Moonracer leaned forward, latching onto the vaguely familiar words. "Like they use in stasis cuffs?"

Triage nodded, optic ridges lowering over his optics in severe thought. "But on a much larger scale. A generator that large could create a wall of static that would disrupt any circuit that came in contact with it." He looked over at Alpha Trion standing next to him. "It could easily be used to direct the insecticon Swarm."

Alpha Trion nodded slowly, an old humming coming from his vocorder as he stroked his frayed wire beard into order. Moonracer couldn't tell if the humming was intentional or not.

"Yes, indeed he could. And if I'm not mistaken that there-" He indicated a string of numbers trailing up the side of a cabinet. "-is Sigma Prime's unfinished formula."

Triage's optic ridges lowered still, but Moonracer only looked between them in confusion. Usually her lack of scientific knowledge didn't bother her, but this was getting ridiculous. "What's that?"

"Hm?" Alpha Trion hummed and then realized she'd asked a question and dragged himself out of his head. "Oh, Sigma Prime was the Prime after Prima and therefore the first to be chosen by the High Council instead of the Matrix of Leadership."

Moonracer frowned hard, dredging up the bits and pieces of old stories she had heard as a youngling. "Because it was lost, right? The Fallen hid it after killing his brothers."

Alpha Trion shrugged one spiked shoulder guard, nearly scratching Triage in the process. "Something like that. The point is that Sigma was more of an honorary Prime than Prima or Primon before her, given the title as part of the search for the Matrix. Of course he had no idea where it could possibly be, so he decided to ask Vector Sigma since the old computer was the only remaining relic connected to the Matrix after the death of the Thirteen.

"But without the Matrix to prove he was a Prime, Sigma couldn't get in. He tried to break the algorithm locking him out, but as you can see he never finished."

Alpha Trion pointed at the numbers on the cabinet. They ended on a strange sort of scribble where Wheeljack's processor had abruptly switched gears.

New questions popped into Moonracer's processor. "So then," she spoke slowly, trying to reason things out, "Shockwave is trying to find...the Matrix? Isn't that what Megatron's doing already?"

"Possibly," Alpha Trion told her. "I can certainly see how undisputed leadership would appeal to Megatron, but I think Shockwave has more immediate plans. I think he's trying to get into Vector Sigma itself."

Triage snorted through his vents sharply. "I never would have pegged Shockwave as one for chasing youngling tales, but then if he wants to waste time, let him."

Alpha Trion's bushy optic ridges rose. "Not all stories are groundless," he told him. "Vector Sigma is very real and trust me when I say that if Shockwave gets inside its vault, Cybertron could be lost to us forever."

But Triage's face plates only grew darker. "Look around you old mech," he grumbled as he turned away, "We've got nothing left to lose. Cybertron's already dead."

...

Moonracer's spark chamber constricted as she watched Triage walk away. Alpha Trion was silent next to her.

"It's not true," she turned towards him, voice barely above a whisper, "is it, Archivist?"

Alpha Trion did not answer her, at least not right away. He stood before the window, watching Wheeljack write more and more fervently across the medbay floor. It was almost impossible to read what he wrote at this point, like his hands couldn't keep up with his processor.

Eventually the old mech sighed. "I don't know," he admitted. "There are too many moving pieces, too many possible outcomes. I can say nothing with certainty now."

Moonracer felt her spark sink in her core. She hadn't realized how much she had hoped for Alpha Trion's reassurance. "Oh . . ." she mumbled.

The wise old mech put a hand on Moonracer's shoulder guard. She thought he was about to say something more, when his head came up sharply and he left, almost running for the door to the isolation room. "Triage!" he shouted across the medbay in a hoarse voice.

Moonracer looked up to see Wheeljack convulsing on the floor just as Alpha Trion reached the door. With a gasp she tore off after him, darting in after the old mech before the door had a chance to fully close.

...

The numbers were everywhere, blocking out sight and sound and touch. The sharp, acrid smell of energon mixing with lubricant stung his nasal plating, but Wheeljack couldn't be bothered to find the source. The numbers were insistent, demanding to get out of his head. Where was Spanner? She'd been here a minute ago.

No. No wait, that couldn't be right because-

A sharp pain lanced through Wheeljack's wrist, traveling up his arm, through his neck, and stabbing into his central processor. Feeling returned to him in a red wave that sent him crashing to the cold floor. Muscle cables seized and spasmed as his processor fought to make sense of . . . everything; where he was, what he was doing, who he was with. His processor fought with itself – the certainty he was back at Iacon Southern Medical Complex warring with the knowledge that he wasn't – and the rest of him paid the price as his processor lost control.

He was vaguely aware of hands holding him down, the small, sharp bite of a hypodermic being delivered, and the soft, feminine voice of his friend.

He focused on the last, hoping to block out the ache of the convulsions until whatever medicine they'd given him could take effect. Small, worn hands were on his head. He thought he knew who they belonged to.

"Span-ner?" But even as he said it, he realized that was wrong. The voice was too high, the hands too rough, but they were all still very familiar.

He managed to crack his optic shutters open and saw Moonracer's disappointed face hovering over his. Scrap. He wasn't in Iacon Southern. This was Alpha Trion's medbay. How had he forgotten that?

How long had he been calling Luna Spanner?

Apparently long enough that she wasn't surprised, which only made Wheeljack feel worse as the meds kicked in and more of his logical thought returned to him. He felt the pressure of Alpha Trion and Triage's hands holding him down fade away as he started to fall under. Above him, Moonracer put on a brave face and nodded.

"Yes, that's right. It's Spanner, just like you said. You're going to be okay."

He was too tired to correct her, much less apologize. The last thing he remembered thinking as Moonracer's face blurred into planes of color above him was that he couldn't let things go on like this. It just wasn't fair to her.

...

"Maybe she was his sister."

Moonracer, half in a doze, snapped her head up at the sound of Molly's question. "Huh?" she mumbled, systems revving back to what passed for full consciousness nowadays.

"This Spanner femme," Molly clarified. "Maybe she was his sister."

Moonracer let her head droop. It had been another long orbital cycle and she didn't want to be talking about this. Unfortunately Molly was very hard to put off and it had already been two days since Wheeljack's last bad afternoon. The seizure had been bad enough that Alpha Trion had decided to keep him under until his processor scans returned to a more normal state. Moonracer hadn't been allowed to see him since.

"He's a Well spark like us." Moonracer indicated herself and Arcee sitting across from her. "Wheeljack doesn't have any sisters."

Molly flapped a hand as if that was only small screws. "Bonded sister then."

Moonracer wanted to shake her head, but truthfully she didn't know. She'd never heard Wheeljack speak of any kind of family, bonded or otherwise.

"I bet they worked together at the med center," Arcee put in. "You said yourself he thinks he's back in his lab at Iacon Southern. So if that's where he thinks he is, then it only makes sense he would think you're someone he used to work with."

It was a perfectly reasonable, logical, explanation and Moonracer wanted to cling to it. But it did little to set her mind at ease.

With her usual lack of tact, Molly opened her mouth and hit the nail right on the head. "Yeah, but how _close_ do you think they worked-ouch!"

Arcee's kick to Molly's shin guard came too late, but the question had already been echoing around Moonracer's processor all morning.

Molly was still rubbing her shin, glaring daggers at Arcee as she sipped her energon. "You know who you could ask," the pink femme said over the rim of her cube as she set it back down on the table. "Beta's been keeping track of Well and carried sparks for generations now. I bet she'd know."

"Who's Beta?" Molly asked, looking between the other two with curious optics.

Moonracer ignored Molly's question and thought about what Arcee had said. "Yeah, but she's hunkered down in East Praxus. We don't have any tunnels leading there since the old A-Line roadway caved in. I couldn't justify the trip, especially with the Swarm lurking around the Iacon-Praxian border. Elita would never allow it."

"We'll go anyway," Molly said. "Now who's Beta? I've never heard of her."

"She was the prima femme before Elita." Arcee finally answered Molly's question. "Passed it on to her after she agreed to be Prime's sparkmate. Something about even footing." She shook her helm. "I don't know exactly, but the old femme's something of a historian too. She was old even in the golden age so she's been recording bonds for eons."

"Well then she's got to know if they were coworkers or, erm-" Molly shot a look at Arcee to find the other femme giving her a warning look and slight shake of her head. "- _more_." She finished lamely. "Right?"

Moonracer looked away. "I don't know," she mumbled. "Bots started hiding that sort of thing when Zeta Prime came to power. He thought sharing sparks like that diluted them or something just as dumb."

"Oh, right," Molly said in such a way that her friends knew she hadn't known that at all.

Arcee held up her hands. "Well, I told you all I know. I only met her the once when she formally made Elita prima and I was like, ten stellars."

"Well, maybe she'll come here," Molly went on, not seeing the way Moonracer was withdrawing in on herself. "She hasn't come since I got here. How long can she stay out there on her own surrounded by nothing but scrap and Swarm?"

Arcee shot her a look. "You'd be surprised. Chromia told me Beta was one of the leaders during the Quintesson war. She comes from a scrimp-and-save generation. I hear she has clean energon stockpiles up to her audios."

Molly gave a piercing electronic whistle. "No wonder she never comes out of her hole," she mumbled.

Conversation dropped off, the femmes suddenly running out of things to say. Moonracer had noticed it had been happening a lot recently, especially around her. She would have called her friends out on it, but she was also finding that, more and more, she preferred the silence.

But it was clear to her it only made Arcee and Molly uncomfortable, so Moonracer got to her feet. "I'm going to go," she mumbled, picking up her untouched cube of energon. She would seal it up and drink it later.

Molly half rose with her. "Do you want me to-" she started to say.

But Moonracer shook her head. "No, I- I think I'll just go check on Wheeljack and then get some recharge. I'll be fine."

If they noticed how watery her words were, they were nice enough not to point it out.

...

Wheeljack was out cold when she got there and unlikely to wake for the rest of the night so Alpha Trion sent her to her quarters with the directive that if he saw her again that night, he would ban her from the medbay for the rest of the orn.

So she slept. The whole night.

 _"Haven't done that in awhile. Maybe things are starting to look up after all."_

The doors to the medbay opened and any good thoughts Moonracer had evaporated. There were three new faces, all mechs, standing on the other side. They were definitely Wreckers, two bruisers – probably serving as an escort for the third mech – and what she thought was a medical transport by the looks of his kibble and the medical crosses emblazoned on his burly upper arms. But even those were scarred and pitted from battle.

One of the bruisers – burnt orange with a massive rifle held securely in one arm – turned and saw her standing in the doorway. He stared at her, optics hidden by his dark visor, and then almost awkwardly turned away and tapped the green triple changer standing next to him with large knuckles.

There was a definite _clunk_ at the impact and the green mech stumbled back a step. "Watch it 'Buster! That's my new armor your putting dents in," he snapped checking his chest armor where Buster had rapped him.

The dark orange mech nodded his head at Moonracer still standing in the doorway, but didn't speak. She got the impression he was . . . shy.

 _"A shy Wrecker,"_ she thought dryly. _"Now I have seen everything."_ And then the door beeped at her and she took a startled step inside.

"Oh," the green mech muttered when he saw her, and then to Moonracer's surprise, came towards her, leaving the two larger Wreckers to stand outside Wheeljack's isolation room.

Moonracer steeled herself, hard days and long nights giving her temper an edge. _"Well, if he wants to have a go, then let's go. I'm in no mood to be pushed around by some muscle-headed Wrecker who thinks he's the next Ultra Magnus."_

But the green mech was oddly subdued when he stopped in front of her. "You must be Moonracer," he said, voice low. "I heard about you from some of the other patients in medbay after Tyger Pax, but I never had the gut-wiring to come and talk to you. Name's Springer."

He held out his large hand to her and, still a bit suspicious, she took it. "What do you want with me, Springer?" she asked slowly.

He ducked his head and rubbed at the back of his neck with a large hand. Moonracer gave him a sidelong look. _"What's with these Wreckers today? They're acting like minicons trying to stare down a Predacon!"_

"I was, _hrm_." He cleared his vents nervously. "I was with Wheeljack at Tyger Pax when Skywarp took him."

He hesitated a klik too long, showing his nerves. Moonracer just stared at him, suddenly remembering why the name Springer sounded vaguely familiar. Ratchet had told her about him when he'd told her Wheeljack had been taken.

"You were there," she mumbled. She had thought of finding him for herself, but had never been able to face hearing a firsthand account of what may have been the last moments of Wheeljack's life.

Springer nodded and continued rubbing the back of his neck nervously. He looked like he wanted to say more, but didn't know what the right thing might be.

 _"This is a silence I can do without,"_ Moonracer decided, fans hitching up another notch as she tried to block out the memory of that awful orbital cycle. "And you're here now because . . . ?" she prompted.

Springer actually met her optics. For the first time he looked confused. "We were called in by Triage. Demanding mech said he needed a medical escort back to Wrecker command on the double."

Moonracer's optic ridges drew together. "What for? Triage is just the same as when he left. He never even left the base."

Springer stared. "Huh? Uh, no, Triage doesn't need the transport for himself. It's for his patient."

Moonracer felt her spark flicker. "His patient?"

Springer nodded and ducked his optics again. "Yeah, that's kind of what I wanted to say in the first place. I volunteered for this run because, well, because I failed. At Tyger Pax."

Moonracer didn't dispute the fact. She wished she could say it was because she was distracted by the mech with the medical transport alt-mode going into Wheeljack's room, but that wasn't the whole of it. She was angry, very angry when it came to Tyger Pax. Few had lost as much as she had. She thought she had let go of it, accepted the outcome, but apparently that wasn't true.

Springer straightened in front of her, the usual Wrecker determined streak flaring strong in his optics. "But I just wanted to assure you that it won't happen again. We'll see him safe enough to Wrecker command and-Hey!"

Moonracer pushed past him, hearing all she needed to. She found Triage blocking her way to the isolation room. "You!" she thundered, jabbing a digit at the mech's chest plates. "What do you think you're doing taking him with you! He's barely well enough to stand on his own. You can't just go moving him around like he's nothing!"

She expected Triage to shout back at her, but for once he remained calm. He held up his hands and didn't raise his voice, but he didn't let her in either. She could just see the other medi-bot inside, securing an unconscious Wheeljack to a transport stretcher.

She tried to push past Triage but he was very solid for a small mech. "Stop it!" she shouted at the unnamed Wrecker handling Wheeljack. "Yeah, I'm talking to you buddy! Get him back on his slab right now!"

He didn't, although he did stop what he was doing. He looked a bit sheepish, like he'd been caught red handed.

Triage held out a hand to his counterpart. "Just, wait a minute Quickfix. Make sure everything else is in order."

Quickfix nodded and locked the stretcher into place so it wouldn't float away while his back was turned. With another uncertain look at Moonracer, he sidled past her and Triage, heavy bulk barely fitting through the door. She'd never seen Wreckers walk on eggshells around anyone before. At any other time she would have found it very funny.

But nothing was striking her as funny today.

"No," Moonracer bit out, poking Triage again in the chest plates. " _No_ , he is not going with you. If you think I'm just going to sit here and let you take him-"

"He asked me to," Triage told her slowly, voice just loud enough that it carried over hers.

Moonracer stopped, extremities going cold. "What?"

Triage's faceplates were pinched. It was the first time he'd ever had trouble saying what was on his mind. "He was having one of his lucid moments and he asked me to take him with me when I returned to Wrecker command."

His voice was slow and even, but that didn't make it any easier for Moonracer to understand. "But . . ." she tried to make sense of this, " _why_? Why would he-?"

She left off, shaking her head. This didn't make any sense.

But Triage didn't have an answer for her. "You'd have to ask him."


	8. Routine

Another chapter, more misery and mysteries and, naturally, gratitude for your reviews and favs over the last week. Especially 2211 Nighthawk for your review. Yeah...Wheeljack's not in a good place right now, what with the torture and the mind games and the giant hungry bug-creature trying to eat everything in sight. Come to think of none of them are particularly upbeat... But they'll climb out of it. They're Autobots after all.

Please read and review! And I'm trying to get better about updating regularly, so hopefully I'll see you around the same time next week. Bye!

* * *

Across Bounding Interstellar Waves

8 – Routine – 8

...

Nothing dulls the senses like an unwavering routine.

...

Orns went by and Moonracer never got her answer. Instead she got a routine. It wasn't what she wanted, but it helped.

Wait. Aim. Fire. Repeat.

It wasn't exactly an elaborate routine – and the waiting part had its own subroutines to account for refueling and recharging – but it helped her keep her focus on survival, rather than . . . anything else.

Moonracer shuttered her optics against the fierce wind sweeping up from the Hydrax Plateau, carrying grit and the smell of rusting metal with it. Home to the largest battle in the early days of the war, the plateau was a wasteland of ruined buildings and decaying metal frames. Nothing moved across its ravaged surface. Nothing except the Swarm.

Tucked against the side of one of the remaining control towers once used to direct air traffic for the spaceport, Moonracer watched the plains with half-shuttered optics, cursing the wind that had sprung up as she pulled a pair of optic shields out of her subspace and secured them to her nasal plating and the sides of her head with magnetic fastenings. They were small and round to fit under the brim of her helm and extended the range of her vision so that indecipherable specks halfway across the plateau jumped out in perfect clarity. They were also tinted light green to match her paint job; her only nod to her more feminine side.

 _"That and it keeps the confusion of whose is whose to a minimum."_

She tuned the settings so she could see the middle of the plateau clearly and cringed slightly as the Swarm popped out in disgusting clarity.

"Oo," Moonracer mumbled as she watched the collage of insecticon parts and pieces twitch and jitter with imitated life, "you are one ugly beastie, aren't you?"

Half a mile away, it didn't hear her, just continued its rummaging through what was now largely recognized as a mass grave.

Tapping the optic shields to their normal preprogrammed tint, Moonracer switched her line of sight to her scope, centering what she could only assume was the Swarm's head in its powerful sights. But she didn't fire. That wasn't part of her routine today, not that it would do any good to shoot something that was made up of ten thousand something-elses.

No, today she had a different goal in mind.

She swung her high powered rifle down and to the left, searching for the signs of life that she already knew were there. It didn't take long to find Firestar's bright orange paintjob amid the metal made colorless by the constant wind and the lonely height of the plateau. It looked like she, Arcee, Molly, and Roulette were still looking for the warehouse the spaceport must have used to store energon. Their little group of femmes were running out of safe energon to consume and were being forced to scavenge. At this rate they'd have to steal from Shockwave just to remain functioning.

"We need to get the Pit out of here if you ask me, though of course no one does," Moonracer muttered to herself. She hadn't had anyone else to talk to in what felt like days. "The sooner the better."

She fell silent again, more sullen then before. She knew that little pearly femme Dovetail had given Elita a ship before she and her neutral party had escaped in the exodus with the _Ark_ , but other than that she had no idea how the preparations were going. Or why it was taking them so long to get off Cybertron. Before she hadn't cared because she hadn't wanted to leave, but now that they she knew what had happened to-

She shook her head viciously to brake that train of thought.

"The point remains," she continued after an agitated moment. "It's not like there's anything left for us here," Moonracer mumbled to a flying bat-bot that had taken roost on the tower not far from her head. "What Megatron didn't poison, Shockwave destroyed." She looked over at the dark purple and green bat-bot chittering as it tweaked its feathery wire antennae into place. "I would watch my back if I were you. He's a nasty piece of work. You should see what he did to my friend."

It took her a nano-klik to realize what she'd said.

Warm air left her vents in a rush as she reached up and pinched the bridge of her nasal guard. "Frack." No matter what she did or where she was, it always came back to him, didn't it?

Grumbling to herself, Moonracer sighted down her scope again, watching her friends as they broke the lock on another warehouse and quickly searched it. Roulette, with her police academy training and state-certified very rare, and very useful, duel scion spitter 8000s worked into her arms, remained outside to watch their exit.

They didn't find anything and moved on to the next warehouse. Moonracer sighed, caught awkwardly between bored and highly strung. With nothing but the Swarm to occupy her attention, her processor kept trying to wander back to Wheeljack. Why had he left? They'd had the equipment to heal him, certainly had the space to accommodate him. He didn't _have_ to leave. It was frustrating and disheartening because the truth was she could only think of one reason that made sense and it made her spark shrink.

Wheeljack was a sweet, smart mech, not to mention easy on the optics with all those straight lines and bright optics. It was hard for Moonracer to imagine that she was the only femme that had noticed. This Spanner he kept mistaking her for must have been his sweetspark from before the war. There must be something about herself that reminded him of her.

 _"I guess that explains why Wheeljack never responded to my valentine,"_ Moonracer thought dejectedly. _"Even if he did . . . feel something for me, it was only because I reminded him of Spanner. It was silly of me to think it could have been anything else."_

Her thoughts petered out, leaving Moonracer in mental silence as the wind started to blow sideways.

Down on the ground, the other girls finally found what they were looking for.

::Bingo!:: Molly sent across the team's frequency, dragging Moonracer's optics down to see the young femme reappear from a warehouse with a cube of frothy green energon in her hands. ::Not exactly the best vintage, but it's gotta be better than that purple stuff.::

::I dunno.:: Arcee argued as she eyed the liquid. ::It looks halfway to being decent high grade rather than energon.::

::Then it's a good thing it's not meant for drinking.:: Firestar told her. ::It's good enough. Load it up and let's get out of here.::

Moonracer sent a questioning ping, not sure what to make of the first part.

Firestar halted before she could trigger her transformation process. Moonracer knew she vented a sigh before she answered even though the distance made it impossible to hear anything.

::Elita has it slotted as fuel for the _Starlight_. Non-sentient ships have fuel intake chips hardwired in, so they can't tell the difference between old energon and bad high grade. As long as it's not unstable, we can use it. No need to be picky.:: She explained before finally shifting down into her flatbed alt-mode.

Moonracer heard the sound of her transformation all the way up from her nest and she felt her joints freeze as she realized that if she could hear it, so could the Swarm.

Not-far-enough-away the monstrosity stopped, all of its malformed heads craning up to try and pinpoint the source of the sound. It stood there, listening, _thinking_ , as if it was trying to gauge how big a creature had made that sound and if it was edible or not.

It finally turned back to its grave robbing, deciding to ignore the source of the noise, but not before Moonracer's spark started to sputter in her chest.

"Girls,"she whispered across her comm. unit, afraid a more silent ping would take too long to reach them. "Keep it down. The Swarm's not exactly full."

Down below, all heads turned towards Molly.

The youngest femme stared back over her arms full of energon cubes. ::What? Why's everybody lookin' at me?::

Arcee and Roulette returned their attention to the energon without answering. They quickly took the best from the warehouse and packed them into Firestar's flat bed. Even knowing they were moving as fast as they could, Moonracer wished they could pick up the pace. The Swarm was slowly meandering closer to their side of the plateau and the shrinking distance was making Moonracer's tanks clench.

"Don't dawdle girls..." Moonracer murmured to herself as she returned her attention to the meandering Swarm. It was still oozing slowly, but it was faster than its jigsaw appearance belied. All it took was one, just-loud-enough sound from the search party and it would be on them in nano-kliks.

Knowing how fast the tides could turn, Moonracer settled the butt of her rifle more securely against her shoulder guard. Shockwave and his Swarm were not going to claim anymore of her friends. Not while she was up here.

The ground party finished loading Firestar's flatbed with only one more trip into the warehouse. ::That's all of it.:: Arcee relayed as she jogged out of the partly open door and gave Moonracer an exaggerated thumbs up for good measure.

The cubes only took up half of the bed. Their leader's voice, when she spoke, was resigned. ::It'll have to do. Come on, we'll take what we have back home.::

::Wait!:: Molly's voice stopped them all. Moonracer looked for her, but didn't see her. _"She must still be inside."_

She was. ::There's another stack hidden back here. Roulette, you must have walked right by it-::

"Molly wait, no! It's-"

Roulette's words rang up from the ground, making Moonracer's spark stutter in her chest. She looked out in the distance to see the Swarm with its head raised. It had definitely heard her.

And even if it hadn't, it definitely would have heard the screeching wail of the siren when it started to clamor inside the warehouse.

"-booby trapped," Roulette finished.

Molly stood frozen in the door of the warehouse, three energon cubes stacked one on top of the other in her hands. They did little to hide the fearful expression on her faceplates.

"Oops-" she only just managed to say before Moonracer was shouting across the comm. "Get out of there! _Now!_ "

It was coming. Sweet Primus, it was coming fast! "It's by the landing pads! No, the tower no-just- just get out! Leave the energon and go!"

"No!" Firestar called back. "We need it! Otherwise it won't matter where we go."

"Just like it won't matter if it kills you-!" Moonracer tried to say.

And then the Swarm was there, clawing its way through rusted buildings when the spaces between proved too small to let it through. Its roar was deafening, multiplied by a thousand throats as the individual pieces screamed. For a split second the horrible sound froze the femmes scattered at its feet.

Moonracer fired twice into the buzzing wave of insecticon parts and mutated wings. The creature jerked away, raising a mutated limb to protect the general area of its head, screaming its displeasure. The sound must have shaken the others awake, because Roulette's arms transformed into scion blasters – the best pre-war Cybertron law enforcement had to offer – and unloaded the energy clip into the side of the Swarm's head, giving Arcee time to throw herself into her sleek alt-mode and peel out and around the Swarm's other side.

But even as she fired her own blaster at the beast, Moonracer swore. Their bullets and lasers were only absorbed by the mass. A handful of bug parts fell away from the whole, but they were only a drop in the bucket.

"It's no good," Roulette called out as she took another shot anyway, trying in vain to find the one kill shot her central processor kept insisting _had_ to be in that mess somewhere. "Bullets can't stop it. I'm not even sure a bomb could! There are just too many bits and pieces-Ah!"

Tired of the projectiles stinging its mottled skin, the Swarm raised what might have been an arm and slammed it down to the ground, kicking up dust and debris and sending the femmes closest to it flying back. Even Firestar down on her wheels was shoved back by the force, energon cubes scattering across the ground in all directions.

"Girls!" Moonracer cried. She scoured the dust cloud for movement, but all she could see was Molly. She was the farthest away and the only one of them still on her feet, energon cubes clasped in her hands as she stared, joints locked by sheer terror.

Energon cubes...

"Molly!" Moonracer realized. "Molly toss it!" she shouted. But Molly didn't understand. She stood there, frozen, as the Swarm loomed over her, all heads and lopsided optics. It opened a thousand maws to devour her and dove forward, its passage scattering the dust cloud hiding their sisters-in-arms from sight-

Firestar barreled into the younger femme's side, knocking them both to the ground out of the Swarm's way. As the monstrosity hit the ground face first, Arcee and Roulette grabbed scattered energon cubes from the ground and hurled them at the Swarm.

Moonracer picked one and tracked it as it reached its highest point and began to descend towards the Swarm. When it was close enough to its back, she took the shot, making the cube explode like a miniature bomb.

Debris from the storage cube embedded itself in pieces of the Swarm, making it lean back as it howled from uncountable vocorders.

Moonracer didn't pay listen as she found the other free falling energon cube and shot it out of the sky as well. Closer to the Swarm, the following iridescent explosion blackened a patch of mutated insecticons and had the howl rising in pitch as boiling energon seeped in the spaces between the individual insecticons.

Moonracer discharged the empty casing, not flinching as the heated jacket flew past her face before landing on the floor with metallic _clink_.

Molly's paralysis had disappeared when Firestar shoved her away from the Swarm. "Go, go!" Moonracer vaguely heard her screaming over the open line. "We can't kill it like this. Transform and roll ou-!"

Another sound, deep and dangerous, like ice cracking, drowned out her words. "Wa-what was that?" Molly managed to say past her fear.

Moonracer looked around, her scope swinging from side to side. "I don't know, I don't know!" she said quickly. The femmes had frozen in place, blasters trying to track this new threat. Even the Swarm had stopped where it was and was muttering and growling as it inspected something ear its feet. It tried to go after the femmes again, but the cracking grew into an ominous rumble...

Moonracer's vent hitched up. "Get out!" she shrieked, pitch almost too much for her comm. "The ground's collapsing! It's a giant sinkhole!"

For a nano-klik they stood there, frozen, before Molly threw herself into her heavily armored alt-mode and gunned for the nearest edge of the hole. Giant cracks were spearing through the roadway now, and growing longer all the time. The others were immediately on her rear axle and Moonracer saw clouds of dust rise in their wakes as they each floored their gas pedals.

 _"Not fast enough_ ," she realized as the Swarm screamed at the femmes' shrinking tailpipes. It put more of its weight on the unstable ground, breaking whatever supports had remained underneath the surface. Concrete and steel busted, sending the ground, the buildings, and the femmes down into a new darkness.

Moonracer heard their tinny screaming over the open comm. line. " _No_!" she screamed, leaning over the edge of the tower, reaching for them for all the good it did.

The screams cut off in a hush of static, the rumble of debris the only sound in Moonracer's audios.

 _"And just when I thought I couldn't feel any worse..."_

Optics flaring with frantic light flicked over the settling rubble. The landslide was already leveling off so the hole couldn't be that deep. She needed to get down there, needed to start scanning for their spark signatures. It was still possible they were alive even if their bodies were past repair-

A terrible scream made her head snap up. _"Primus no!"_

The Swarm was still there, screaming its frustration at losing its prey. As Moonracer watched, its body morphed, the neck growing longer as mutated insecticons crawled over each other for a better look at the destruction. Moonracer leaned away, suddenly acutely aware that she was alone against that monstrosity. She pressed her back against the side of the tower, disturbing half rusted ceiling tiles...

One gave way. She tried to catch it, nearly throwing herself off the side of the tower to get at it, but it flew away from her outstretched fingers. It fell in silent freeway...and then struck the ruins of the building the tower stood over.

Moonracer flinched at the storm of clatters, clangs, and un-muted scraping that following. _"Oh...it's bound to notice that."_

The Swarm's malformed head lifted, numerous red eyes flicking toward the sound. There was an inquisitive buzz as they searched for the source...and found Moonracer's heat silhouette crouched at the top of the structure.

Way in the back corner of her mind, something whimpered.

The creature lumbered toward her, buzzing curiosity transforming into irritation as sure as if they had a T-cog. Moonracer backpedaled, forgetting her sniper rifle in the process as she tried to crawl to the exit without scraping herself in the process. It was getting closer, stepping on hollowed out factories and storage warehouses like they were made of organic material.

She was almost around the tower when she finally remembered her rifle. Swearing fervently to herself, Moonracer stretched out a hand to steady herself against the floor as she leaned back and pulled her rifle behind her with the other. Briefly she felt the solid surface beneath her palm.

And then that solidity was gone. The floor slid away to reveal a square tunnel leading almost straight down. Moonracer didn't know where it led or why the hatch had opened now, but she couldn't catch herself. She gave a startled scream as the familiar but uncomfortable feeling of her balance gyros trying to stabilize made her head spin and she tumbled head first down into the darkness.

 _..._

Halfway round the world, the Wreckers were having their own tough time of it.

"Where'd it come from? Intel said the Swarm was still out on the Hydrax Plateau! What's it doing out here?"

Twin Twist looked over at his brother with a sharp frown. He had to shout over the _ratta-tatta_ bursts of his heavy minigun. "How am I supposed to know? I got here the same time you did."

Topspin pulled the pin out of a grenade with his teeth and let it fly. "I dunno. You're the sensitive, listening one. I thought you'd know."

The grenade hit the soft mass of the Swarm and was immediately sucked in...and then immediately spat back out. The Autobots ran for the cover of the broken city – rocks, boulders, broken down pylons, anything big enough to hide their bulk – and the resulting explosion sent a wash of heat bleeding into the air.

Behind the cracked wall of what might have once been a bank, Wheeljack cringed away from the heat and sound. But it stuck in his skull, reverberating around like vibrations through a metal pot. It bled into his memory, or his memory bled into reality, he couldn't tell anymore, until all he was left with was the boiled down certainty that he'd done this before. And it hadn't ended well.

It was all he could do to focus on the green frame moaning on the uneven ground in front of him, his energon-slick fingers shaking as he tried to keep the circulatory wires in his hands straight.

 _"Don't blow this one up,"_ he kept telling himself. _"Good medibots don't blow up their patients."_

The fact that he wasn't a medibot at all, much less a good one, hadn't managed to get lost in his faulty memory.

His spark tried to crawl into his core as the Swarm screamed, the sound of it tearing through his central processor as sure as shrapnel, and he nearly dropped the circuits into Springer's open chest. One of the individual Swarm had taken a bite out of him and shaken the burly mech around like a ragdoll, nearly ripping his spark chamber right out of his chest. Wheeljack had managed to stabilize his spark output, but he was still losing energon too fast for safety.

And now he was fading in and out of consciousness, probably from the dent in his head sparking where something had cut through his helm and left a gouge in his cranium. "Springer?" Wheeljack snapped as he worked. "Springer stay with me, all right? Springer!"

The mech groaned and managed to move his head slightly. His mouth moved but Wheeljack couldn't hear what he said over the din.

"What?" he asked too loudly. The comm. line was too loud in his audios.

"Said name's not Springer!" the mech managed better this time.

Wheeljack stared at him. He wasn't? Scrap, he wasn't! Wheeljack glanced at his faceplates. Their formation was familiar. He knew that he knew him, but couldn't for the life of him remember who the mech was.

"Well I'm an engineer, not a doc, so that's okay then," he told the mech as the heat of another explosion washed over his back.

A terrible grinding noise that might have been a chuckle tumbled out of his vocorder. "Machine's a machine," he mumbled. "Just don't get m'wires crossed."

Wheeljack connected the last one. "I make no promises," he muttered as he exchanged his hand for his welding torch and them immediately replaced it as Ratchet's voice shouted, unbidden, in his head, _Energon is highly flammable you little fool!_

"I'm gonna have to staple you shut until we can get to Triage," Wheeljack told the mech as he pulled out his bolt gun. The words _This is going to hurt_ didn't seem necessary.

The mech – his name had something to do with roads, Wheeljack was sure – just tightened his grip on the gun he'd never let go of. "Just get me out there, Engineer."

Wheeljack grunted. "Those bugs must have dented your head harder than I thought," he muttered before placing the first staple.

He didn't scream, which was a relief to Wheeljack, but after the second he saw it was because he'd passed out. He thought it was from the pain, but then saw the fresh flow of energon leaking down his chest plates to pool on the ground beneath him.

Wheeljack swore and pressed both hands hard against the wound. Or he tried to. _"Armor's in the way."_ He cast his optics around. _"Plate cutter. Where's the plate cutter?"_

Pressing not doing any good, he raised a hand and activated his comm. only to hesitate when he realized there was no one to call. Ratchet was off in a spaceship somewhere and Triage was back at base dealing with the patients he'd gathered after the last Swarm attack.

An anger he'd thought had gone cold rose up again. _"It's supposed to be on the other side of the planet! We're not prepared for this! If we were anyone else we'd all be scrap metal by now!"_

He looked up just in time to see one of the other Wreckers – Leadfoot he thought – go flying into a ruined building like a cannonball with a mouth. He ducked his head against the dust that billowed out. "Hey!" he called out when he heard the mech groan. "Hey, I need a plate cutter over here!"

The burly mech stumbled to his feet. "And I need a blaster that works against this thing. Deal with what you've got."

"He'll be dead if I do that!" But Twin Twist was already leaping back into the battle with a war cry.

Wheeljack grit his teeth until his jaw screws creaked. The chatter was louder now, a never ceasing parade of noise in his audios. He tried breaking into it, but there was so much of it now that it was a solid wall, unbreakable from the outside. Cries mixed with clicking mixed with threats from both sides. It was a pounding in his head, a physical pressure squeezing his brain module. He couldn't take much more of this and Roadbuster was still bleeding out under his hands.

He staggered to his feet, the whoops and energon-thirst of the Wreckers great enough to stand up to the sheer fury of the Swarm bearing down on them. None of them paid him any attention.

"Shut up," he told them in a voice that only added to the chaos. His irritation at being ignored fed his internal fire and he pressed back against the pressure in his head, shoving it with whatever strength he had left in him. Words came boiling out his mouth as he advanced on them all.

"Shut up, shut up, _shut up_!" he screamed at them all like some kind of lunatic. "I am trying to work here so all of you just _shut up_ _and get me a plate cutter before Roadbuster dies_!"

The chatter immediately stopped.

The pressure dropped away, vanishing or merely held back Wheeljack couldn't discern. After so much noise the silence was deafening, but a relief to Wheeljack's frayed nerves.

He looked around again, afraid to think what he looked like, furious and covered in someone else's gore, but too angry to care. The Wreckers were staring at him in surprise, all keeping one optic on the Swarm. But it had stopped too. Only Wheeljack was certain he hadn't shocked it. It was more like- more like something was wrong with them, all the insecticons. Like they were paralyzed.

He scowled at their conglomerate body, took in their shaking limbs and minutely twitching antenna. Had he scared them into submission? No, no that couldn't be. The fury was rolling off them in red hot waves. They wanted to move, they just couldn't.

 _"They're paralyzed,"_ Wheeljack realized curiously. But he didn't have time to marvel at their new state.

The pressure in his head started to creep back in. _Kill two-legger..._ he made out the strongest voice in the mess of others. _Gut him. Squeeze him. Suck him dry..._

He shook his head, pressing back harder against the din in his fight for thinking room. He scowled at the Wreckers, now fidgeting in unease as they watched the frozen Swarm, weapons still hanging in the air.

"What're you just standing there for?" he demanded, understanding Ratchet for the first time in his long career with the mech. "Someone get me a scrappin' plate cutter!"

Some of the mechs looked around, as if he'd forgotten his lying on the ground somewhere. But when someone finally stepped forward, it wasn't any of the Autobots.

A single insecticon stepped out of the Swarm. It wasn't like the one Wheeljack had seen Alpha Trion studying; this one was whole. No third antenna or missing limbs or malformed wings, but a perfectly formed, if not miniaturized, mech stood there watching him with red optics set above a rust-spotted grill.

A slightly warped plate cutter rested in his hand.

Wheeljack and the insecticon stared at each other, neither moving. He could feel the pressure building back up, or trying to, but even after he dismantled it yet again, one vibrating voice still remained in his head. One that wasn't his.

 _It commands Bombshell. Bombshell must obey, but no want to! Want to rend it!_

Digits curled around the plate cutter at the adamant thought and with a start, Wheeljack realized that he could _hear the insecticon's thoughts_.

His processor immediately rejected the idea. No, no it wasn't true. There was no possible way for it _to_ be true after all. Mental connections weren't formed on their own. They were a side effect – a byproduct of the bonding process. And that wasn't- that _couldn't_ be-

Wheeljack shoved away the terror blooming in his spark and focused on the plate cutter in the insecticon's hand. He needed that. Roadbuster would extinguish without it. _That_ was fact. _That_ was his reality.

Refusing to acknowledge the voice still buzzing around the edges of his mind, Wheeljack held out his hand, _willing_ the plate cutter to be placed _there_.

With slow, jerky steps, as if someone was forcing his body to move without his permission, the insecticon crossed the still space between him and the Autobot. He tipped his hand, digits reluctantly releasing the plate cutter so that it fell clumsily into Wheeljack's palm.

Wheeljack grabbed it before it could slide to the ground.

"Thank you," he mumbled, not sure what else to say.

The buzzing voice fought harder. _Kill you!_ it shrieked.

Wheeljack refused to flinch as the non-sound stabbed at his processor. He stared down the mech barely half his size, forcing his own voice louder than his, stronger. _Leave._

He fought against the command...and then reluctantly gave in, backing away to the rest of his Swarm with his eyes pinned on Wheeljack's face. He refused to give him his back.

The Swarm reabsorbed him, clicking and chittering softly. Wheeljack thought they sounded uncertain and he pressed the feeling until it was overbearing. They shuffled back, a thousand glinting optics pinned to his frame with fierce, almost hungry, intensity. First one step, then another, then another...

"What's going on?" he heard one of the Wreckers whisper, followed by a sharp but equally soft shushing, but their voices sounded far away. Unimportant.

The Swarm was at the edge of the ring of broken buildings. They tried to stay there, stand firm against him, but Wheeljack bore down on them. **_Leave._**

He stepped forward and the Swarm flinched back.

They eyed him a moment longer, and then turned and fled, disappearing into the city streets like a wave of rustling, clicking legs.

Wheeljack stood there, not trusting the sudden lack of pressure in his mind. He heard the other Wreckers gathering in wary confusion behind him.

"Um..." he heard Springer's voice – the actual Springer this time – breaking into the silence. "What just happened?"

Satisfied that the Swarm was well and truly gone, Wheeljack turned around to find the Wreckers standing a few yards away from him, watching him warily.

His body suddenly felt impossibly heavy, but he made it move anyway. Roadbuster wasn't _gaining_ energon after all.

"I got Roadbuster a plate cutter," he told them in exhaustion. "Now someone comm. Triage and let him know he has a critical coming in." He tromped past them, relying on them to relay the order. "I'm going to try and stop the leak."

They all moved away from him as he passed and he felt their optics on his back, as untrusting as the Swarm's had been. He wasn't surprised.

He didn't trust himself either.


	9. Situation: Critical

:D Hey everybody! I'm glad you're back and looking forward to more excitement! I hope you've got your boots on, because the scrap's really going to hit the revolving ventilation system this time...

* * *

Across Bounding Interstellar Waves

9 – Situation: Critical – 9

Elita-One stared at the two dirty, dust-coated femmes standing before her desk in their small command center, the minute sounds of Greelight, Lancer, and Nautica filling the background as they saw to their different duties. "Basement? What basement?"

Firestar and Roulette looked at each other before returning their optics to their commander. "More like a sub-structural maintenance facility sitting underneath the spaceport," Firestar rephrased. "We think they used to fix the ships down there along with...other things."

Elita's optic ridges creased together. "What kind of other things?" she asked.

"I dunno," Firestar gave a partial shrug. "Secret things."

Elita's mouth flattened. "Well that's helpful," she grumbled.

Firestar obviously didn't know what to tell her and shot a somewhat panicked 'little help here!' look to Roulette standing stoically next to her, bright paintjob hidden by a thick coat of blue-gray dust.

The former law-bot straightened and reported in her usual no-nonsense way, "We're not sure exactly. The structure wasn't on any of the maps I downloaded of the spaceport, however we discovered pieces of what I believe were artificial gravity generators."

Elita felt her optic ridges raise even further. "You think they were building spacecraft?" she asked. "That was made illegal when Sentinel Prime put the Travel Ban into effect and isolated Cybertron."

Firestar snorted. "You mean when he got all paranoid the organics would follow us home and invade us?" she grumbled under her vents.

Elita shot her a look, but didn't respond. Instead she gave Roulette a nod to continue, feeling she had more to say.

She did. "I also saw weapons turrets and hull mounts for plasma cannons. That

combined with the rumors I heard during my time with Iacon Law Enforcement makes me think we were in some kind of secret manufacturing facility."

The rose red femme-bot thought about this, fingers interlaced just below her chin. "A secret network under the Hydrax Spaceport made for assembling star craft," she murmured. "Interesting." She looked up at them with sharp optics. "And you found energon there?"

They both nodded. "Enough to fuel the _Starlight_ for two generations," Firestar told her. "We grabbed as much as we could haul, but that was less than a third of what we found. And it was premium stuff too. _Ark_ class at the very least."

Elita nodded. "I'll inform Magnus. Together we should be able to transport it to the ships." She twisted her head around to the other femmes. "Nautica!" She called out. "How close is the _Starlight_ to space worthy?"

The indigo painted femme, her paintjob spotted with the usual grease and oil of a mechanic, though her processor was capable of so much more Elita knew, straightened from where she'd been tampering with the life-sensors that warned them when anything with a spark pulse approached. She must have upset her balance gyros standing so fast because she wobbled backward briefly before finding her equilibrium.

Nautica put the back of her hand to her forehead and spoke in a strained voice. "Almost there, Prima. If the energon they found is really as good as they think-" She gestured with an oil-blackened wrench between Roulette and Firestar. "-then all that's left is the glitch in the gravitational settings so we don't float to the ceiling like balloons, and the quantum generations. There was a kerfuffle in their last scan that I didn't like."

"And how long will that take?"

The younger femme shrugged, spinning the wrench and nearly clanging herself in the temple. "Um, two orbits, maybe three depending on what's wrong. Quantum mechanics are my specialty, so it shouldn't take longer than that. The energon was what we really needed though. With that it'll all be a piece of oil cake."

Elita nodded once as Nautica bent back down to tend to the sensors, talking to them like she usually did as she worked.

The femme commander turned back to her party leader and her second, a thoughtful expression coming onto her usually serene faceplates. "Strange though," she said after thinking a long moment. "That we should find exactly what we need in a hidden complex like that. A hidden complex you _all_ just happened to end up in without coordination."

"One we literally fell into during a landslide," Firestar added.

"A landslide we were all fortunate enough to survive without serious injury," Roulette said with narrowed optics.

Firestar shrugged, the movement causing a small shower of grit to rain to the floor. "Freak accident."

Roulette's optics narrowed further. "I am...not convinced."

Firestar scoffed. "You never are."

Roulette eyed her out of the corner of her optics. "Well at least I didn't hallucinate while we were down there."

Elita sat up. "Hallucinate?" she repeated in concern. "I thought you said Alpha Trion cleared you Firestar." But she raised her optic ridges in disbelief anyway. It wouldn't be the first time Firestar had put off a medical exam.

The orange and red femme flinched before scowling at Roulette. "I _did_ ," she protested. "Just like I _did_ see someone while I was down there. She led me to the energon stores."

"She?" Elita questioned. "There's another femme down there? Why didn't you bring her here with you?"

"I couldn't. Because-" Firestar hesitated and Elita knew this was going to be bad. "-she was a data ghost."

Even expecting something strange, Elita-One hadn't been prepared for that. "A...data ghost?"

Firestar nodded, Roulette rolling her optics next to her. "Yeah. I could see through her and everything. She didn't talk, but before the other girls caught up with me she showed me to the storage area where all the energon cubes are."

"At least we know _those_ are real," Roulette muttered.

Elita waved a hand to stop the retort she saw in Firestar's puckered faceplates. "And Alpha Trion saw nothing to worry about in your scans?" she pressed.

" _No_ , Elita. He says I'm fine."

Elita eyed her for another nano-klik, then let the issue drop, seeing nothing she could do about it. Alpha Trion would certainly know more about the central processor than she did. "And the others, how are they?"

"Dents and scratches," Firestar reported, visibly relieved to be moving on. "We were lucky. The worst of it was Moonracer's busted knee joint. She wrenched it good when she fell down that delivery chute."

A dislocated joint was indeed light given how far the femme had fallen, but then she had lots of practice surviving falls with all of her run-of-the-mill tripping and falling down stairs.

Elita felt her suspicions rise regardless. Roulette was right; this was too coincidental to be easily believed. "Thank you ladies," she dismissed them, rising from her desk. "I'll contact Ultra Magnus and let him know. You two rest up." She cast a critical optic over them. "And clean up before that grit gets into your servos. I don't want any delayed reaction times with that Swarm still out there."

"Yes, Elita-One," they answered in unison before turning and leaving command. "Data ghost." She heard Roulette scoff before the door closed behind them. "I should have Alpha Trion check your central processor for rust damage after spouting such a story."

"It's not a story. I saw her! Swear on the Forger, Roulette!" Firestar cried, her protests heard even through the metal of the door.

Elita-One thought hard in the silence after they left. This was a peculiar twist of events indeed. Downright lucky. Only she hadn't believed in sheer luck since she'd been Ariel.

At the thought of her original designation, Elita looked down at herself, flicking dust off her rose-painted frame, frowning as she once again remembered its original overcheerful yellow.

The tingle at the back of her processor appeared as it always did when she bothered to contemplate her frame, telling her there was more than the old mech's story that he'd had this one in storage for archival reasons. It wasn't that she didn't believe him exactly, just that her intuition had always told her there was more to it than that.

Just like it was telling her more had happened at the plateau than her femmes getting lucky.

Elita frowned, leaning a hip against the edge of her desk and folding her arms over her spark. She needed to see Alpha Trion. There was something cyber-fishy about this borderline-disastrous trip into the plateau. And if they _had_ been guided by some kind of guardian data ghost, then she wanted to know more about it.

She vented a small sigh. But before that she needed to comm. Ultra Magnus and let him know about the new energon stock pile, as well as the underground starship assembly plant. There might be parts down there they could use or take to reinforce their own ships later on. As an officer even before the war, he might also know more about what it was doing down there in the first place...

There was a sigh almost too small to register and then a deafening crash you couldn't help but. "Nautica!" Elita heard Lancer shout in alarm as she spun around to see what had happened.

Nautica was on the floor, shivering feverishly. Her optics were mostly shuttered, only the barest glow of her optics showing at the bottom edge, and they were flickering dangerously.

"Get Alpha Trion," Elita ordered Greenlight as she approached Lancer and the jerking Nautica. "What happened?" she demanded calmly as she knelt next to their Jane-of-all-trades. She put a hand on her forehead, beneath her helm line, trying to keep her head still so she wouldn't accidently bludgeon herself in this state. "Did she shock herself again?"

Lancer shook her head. "I don't think so. She was just chattering to the machinery like she always does and then she – I don't know, it was like she forgot how to talk. She fritzed out and fell over! And-"

A high pitched keen started spitting from Nautica's vocal processor and she turned her head, trying to shake off Elita's hand. Her fingers flexed and twitched and she slowly kicked her feet like she was trying to outrun her sudden fever. As they both watched, the flickering glow of her optics dimmed, changed, and the vibrant color of her frame started to blacken to a dark and sickly gray. It was like her optics were sucking up the rest of her color, transforming from their usual snow-touched blue into...

Into a horrifying shade of violet.

Elita's optics widened, her spark flaring in horror. "She's been exposed to dark energon." She somehow kept her voice calm, even as she got her hands under Nautica's shoulder kibble. She jerked her chin at Lancer. "Get her boots. We've got to stop the spread before it overtakes her spark."

Looks like she'd be seeing Alpha Trion sooner than expected.

...

The Wreckers weren't exactly known for their strong feelings against noise pollution, but the trek back to base was downright saintly in its silence. From the outside, they probably looked more like a funeral party escorting Roadbuster's frame for burial in the Sea of Rust.

There were times on the way back Wheeljack feared that's exactly what they would become before they made it back to Triage, but Roadbuster was built Wrecker tough. His spark was flickering around the edges by the time they pulled up to the Autobot base, but was still far from snuffing out entirely.

Wheeljack stuck around long enough to make sure Triage had Roadbuster in hand before breaking away. He knew it wouldn't be long before Ultra Magnus heard about his encounter with the insecticon and he didn't want to be around when the storm broke. He had no idea what had happened back there, but he knew what it _looked_ like. And it _looked_ like he was in league with the Swarm.

The engineer shuffled down hallways that had been antiquated even before the Autobots' time, too tired to even stand up straight. The chatter in his head was gone, the buzzing faded away with the insecticons, but it still bugged him – and yes, he'd thought that on purpose.

What was it? Where had the voices come from? Certainly not for any comm. line. He didn't have any spark bonds – brothers or sisters or...others – but it _sounded_ a whole lot like the mental speech he'd read about during his studies in Iacon, the kind that could only be heard through a close bond of one kind or another.

" _Ridiculous,"_ he thought, shaking off the thought and the tendril of fear it brought with it. " _Bonds have weight. And- and they're between bots. Sentient machines. Not- not sentient machines and bugs! That's- it's just sick. Unthinkable."_

His step faltered. _"But then...it_ is _Shockwave..."_

He stopped before a door, one possibility and a thousand things that were more preferable to it roiling about his processor. He'd meant to go straight to his bunk to recharge, but these weren't the barracks. There was too much dust, all of it undisturbed by the tromping boots of the Wreckers.

He looked around, spotting the familiar signs of science – crates holding equipment left stacked up along the wall behind him, the lingering smell of chemicals that burned the inside of his nasal plating – and Wheeljack realized his feet had automatically taken him somewhere safe. Room Delta-Five Dash Three. This was the lab Ultra Magnus had said he could use.

He stood before the closed door, staring at it with something that bordered on confusion. What was he doing here? He'd barely stepped foot in the place since Magnus had told him about it. Barely any time, barely any inclination, despite the Commander's not-so-subtle questions about any developments he had made in weaponry they could use against the Swarm.

Wheeljack scowled. _Even when I have ideas I can't keep them in my head long enough to follow through on them. There's no more room. No room for fireworks._

And if there were no ideas, then there was no point in going inside. What good would it do him to sit in a lab, even an antiquated one like this, surrounded by tools and equipment he knew how to use, but couldn't think of a goal worth picking them up for?

There was no point, he told himself, absolutely none at all.

Standing there, staring at that door, the general sense that he was being a moron hovered behind him. But he still couldn't go in.

Wheeljack hunched his shoulders and turned away, quickly retracing his steps towards the barracks; his _original_ destination.

" _At least there's still some point in recharge."_

...

They met Alpha Trion coming up from the medbay.

"How did this happen?" the old mech asked as he jogged next to them at a surprisingly clip pace. That high pitched keening whine was still coming from Nautica's vocorder as Alpha Trion pulled up her shutters and peered at her optics. Blue could still be seen, but it was laced over with spiderweb cracks of Unicron violet.

"I don't know," Elita told him as she hurried to the medbay.

"Th-the ship," Lancer panted as she looked over her shoulder to make sure she wouldn't trip and lose precious time getting up again. "It's out in that junk field. Who knows what she tracked through to get in and out of there."

"Have someone check our own stores for good measure," Alpha Trion muttered as he began work on the femme even as they moved, his hands steadier than Elita had thought possible.

She nodded, sent a silent ping to Chromia as they finally reached the medbay doors.

They opened with even more slowness than Elita was used to, and as soon as there was room between them, she and Lancer squeezed through, Alpha Trion slipping in behind them.

"Get her on the table," he instructed them and they hurried to obey as he grabbed tools Elita had no names for. He probably would have dismissed them immediately if the young femme hadn't started convulsing.

"Hold her down!" Alpha Trion shouted as frantic as Elita had ever heard him. She and Lancer jumped to obey, Lancer pinning her arms as Elita kept her head still. Alpha Trion didn't bother with her legs as he injected something vividly yellow into her systems.

She jerked even more violently, but by the time Alpha Trion got her hooked up to the non-sentient machines, every muscle cable in her frame had gone slack.

Elita let go of Nautica's head warily as Trion engaged the circuit slab's restraints. "Will that reverse the dark energon?" she asked as Nautica's harassed spark pulse translated to a hurried beep on one of the monitors.

"No, that will stall the seizures," Alpha Trion told her as he pressed another injection against her neck and delivered it with a small hiss. " _This_ -" Elita's spark swelled in hopeful triumph. "-will drop her into the deepest kind of stasis I know of."

Her spark slowed back down to its normal, wary pulse. "What good will that do?" Lancer asked loudly at the foot of the circuit slab.

Alpha Trion skewered her with a sharp look. "It will keep the dark energon from taking over her spark long enough for me to find a way to eradicate it."

 _Hopefully_ , they all heard the unspoken qualification.

Elita looked down at Nautica's grayed-out frame, the shallow blue tint stubbornly lingering in her optics. "Work fast," she told him.

Alpha Trion did not have to be told twice.

...

He knew it was a mistake as soon as he put it on the table. He had always believed that no invention was ever done, especially one of his. He had long ago mastered the arts of tampering, tweaking, finagling, upgrading, and all around souping up, but looking down at the rounded sides of his latest invention, nothing came into his head but iron walls.

The handheld self-containment field generator he'd designed and built to handle the dark energon outbreak was half melted, like all of the others that had actually been used. Super heated plastic had bubbled and oozed around wiring that was no longer functional. Dust covered the whole mess, giving it a muted silver sheen in the harsh light of the lab.

He must have stood there staring at it for hours, his hands only moving when he switched them from resting on his hips to tapping at his chin to scrubbing at the back of his helm in frustration. He thought and thought and _thought_ but still nothing new came. No improvements. No upgrades. No tweaks.

Wheeljack sat heavily on the stool behind him, a hopeless huff rolling from his vents. "I knew Shockwave wanted to steal all my inventions," he muttered to himself bleakly, "but I never thought he could steal something I hadn't even invented yet."

He looked down at what the Wreckers still called his 'bubble gun'. "Well," he kept going, having no one else to talk to and no reason not to talk to an unthinking machine, "I guess I already invented you, but you're useless as you are, which means he stole the you you could have been. The better, less explode-y, you."

He sat there a moment, the uncomfortable feeling he was looking at his scratched and dented faceplates in a mirror sneaking up on him.

Needing to do something, he grabbed the deformed muzzle of the weapon and dragged it to him with one hand, the other disappearing into his forearm to reveal the finer components of his tinkering.

It wasn't as relaxing as it should have been. In fact it was infuriating. Usually he thought as he worked, storing new ideas, compiling plans, even taking stock of what parts he had left after Ratchet's latest raid, but his mind remained as blank as an broken screen.

His hands continued working on automatic, cleaning and scraping different components. Even re-melting when the casing proved resistant to chipping.

He eventually cleared enough away to see the inner workings. Or what was left of them. He retracted his fine tools, flexing his hand to get rid of lingering stiffness. He immediately saw the problem – it was so obvious that he wondered how he'd made the mistake in the first place – and he carefully reached in to start pulling out the contradicting parts.

There must still have been a charge in the power system, just enough that when he touched bare wires, bridging the gap between several clusters, it raced through his digits and back into the primary system, sending off a shot into the wall over Wheeljack's shoulder with a _skreeee-boom!_ he remembered all too well.

The wall didn't exploded – the charge was very weak – but it sure socked a dent into it, scattering datapads and tools around him and melting down some of the weaker ones outright.

Maybe it was the too-well remembered sound of the generator, or maybe the powerful stink of melted metal that enveloped him. Whatever it was – the sights, the sounds, the projectiles whizzing past his head – Wheeljack's spark flared in panic. Energon surged through his system, old subsystems reacting to sudden danger as he hit the floor to avoid the worst of it. He clapped his hands over his helm, vision tunneling into blackness. He could hear the energon pounding in his audios, blocking out the sound of alarm and mechs shouting and swearing and powering up weapons systems.

The chaos ran rampant around his head, and then seemed to sink into his processor, pounding at him, releasing a flood of memories. _"I never should've built the dented thing!"_

When his optics finally rebooted from their stress-induced malfunction, Wheeljack saw he wasn't in the lab anymore. He wasn't on base. Wasn't even in Trisessex anymore.

He was back in Tyger Pax.

And Shockwave's shadowed frame was standing over him.

...

Nautica wasn't faring much better.

"I thought you said you'd disrupted the seizures!" Elita found herself shouting only half an hour after Alpha Trion had sunk the femme into her medical stasis. She put more pressure on Nautica's shoulders, surprised by the strength her slender limbs had in them.

"She's not seizing, she's struggling," Alpha Trion snapped back in uncharacteristic unease as he fought to get the femme's wrists locked into the restraints. "The dark energon is still progressing, however slowly. I've given her as much numbing agent as I dare, but even in stasis it hasn't blocked out her awareness of the dark energon."

"What will?" asked Moonracer breathlessly. She was the only one still in the medbay now and she had practically thrown her entire weight over Nautica to try and keep her still.

Alpha Trion's white ridges twitched. "Nothing. Not if what I gave her didn't work."

A high pitched keen interrupted them. It was loud and ragged and it made Moonracer's audios ring, but she thought she heard something almost like words mixed up in the middle.

"Not good," Alpha Trion muttered as he sharply shuffled through his medicine vials.

"Is that the Prime Venacular? Does she even _know_ it?" Moonracer yelled.

"Every spark knows it, deep down," Trion muttered. He'd found what he was looking for and was preparing another syringe. "This will buy us some time..." he murmured.

Elita felt her optics flare. "Enough time-buyers!" she shouted. "The dark energon is the problem so _that_ is what we must fix."

"Well if you have any suggestions," the old mech grumbled low in his processor as he gave Nautica the syringe anyway. "All I can think of that has a decent chance at working is a complete energon transfusion."

"Then do it!" Elita shouted as she threw her weight on Nautica's shoulders when she arced her spinal strut and screamed. When the rosy-pink femme was like this it was hard for Moonracer to remember she'd ever been Ariel at all.

Alpha Trion frowned at her. "It would take every drop of medical grade energon I have left. If this is the start of an outbreak there won't be anything more for anyone else."

There was a moment where the only sound was Nautica's whimpers. Moonracer watched her commander's faceplates as she weighed the possible consequences of each decision.

"Do it anyway," she told him.

...

For a meant-to-be-medic with one foot out the door on his mental status, Wheeljack's capability for destruction was enough to make any Wrecker jealous, even if it was turned on them. He'd already crashed his way through the quickly filling research wing and was now hip-joint deep in the mess hall, screaming at the top of his vocorder.

Ultra Magnus reflected that if perhaps he weren't being so incomprehensible they could decipher what had gone wrong and stop it, but the words were so ragged and tattered that he no more knew what Wheeljack was screaming about than he knew how to perform a spark swap.

The Wrecker commander entered the mess just in time to see the insane engineer launch himself at Topspin with a guttural shout. He got his hands around Topspin's neck, squeezing his fuel lines with a fury none of them had suspected.

"Where is Triage with those tranquilizers?" Ultra Magnus bellowed as Twin Twist and Springer pried Wheeljack off and struggled to subdue him. As strong as they were, it wasn't until a bruised Topspin piled on as well that the balance started to shift.

Wreckers were not known for their respect for authority, but the one that answered Ultra Magnus was so nervous that he snapped a salute before telling him, "Triage is still in surgery with Roadbuster. Says he can't leave."

 _And he probably said it rather rudely too_ , the commander thought grimly. "Well then get the tranqs yourself. He doesn't keep those in surgery." And then when the mech hesitated a nano-klik too long he shouted, "Move it mech!"

Whatever-his-name-was left so fast he left skid marks on the floor. But even if he returned in under a cycle and they knocked Wheeljack out, what then? Was this a complete mental break or just a fracture and he would wake up himself again?

Magnus frowned, his severe faceplates becoming downright grim. They needed a backup plan. Something with a higher chance of working then doping a good engineer every time his digits twitched.

He whirled on Blaster gawking at the mayhem his friend was causing. He'd stayed behind to serve as their communications bot. "Get me Femme Command," he roared, startling the mech. " _Now_!"

...

"Is she going to be okay?"

"I don't know."

Three sets of optics drifted across the medbay to where Elita-One stood before the ER window. Nautica, now blessedly silent, was inside with Alpha Trion, currently recovering from the transfusion of fresh energon that had saved her life. Moonracer was back on her circuit slab across the room, resting her blown joint, Molly and Arcee sitting on either side. Her knee ached something fierce, but it was nothing some dry ice and temporary disuse wouldn't fix.

Arcee leaned forward where she sat, placing her elbows on her knees and clasped her hands together, optics never leaving that window. "Figures. We all make it back from the plateau in relatively mint condition and Nautica keels over from dark energon poisoning right here at home." She scoffed her disgust and leaned back in her chair, arms moving to cross her chest.

"We won't be able to stick around much longer," Moonracer agreed. "It's getting too dangerous."

Molly fidgeted, knee jiggling with unease. She'd never spoken of her fear of leaving Cybertron, but her friends knew it was there.

"But Nautica-" The metal around her optics flexed in concern. Moonracer couldn't tell if she looked far too young or older than she had a right to be. "The transfusion- did it work?"

Moonracer vented a core-deep sigh and finally looked away from the window where Elita stood silent sentinel. She shuttered her optics and cycled new air into her system. "Yes. Worked like a shiny recharge tremor. But Alpha Trion had to use every drop of medi-grade he had to save her. If anyone else is exposed before we get out of here..."

"They're goners," Arcee finished for her when she didn't have the spark to say it herself.

Molly paled and bit her lower lip, then looked away, knee jumping quicker as she wrung her hands. Moonracer shot Arcee a look and raised her hands. _Really?_ shemouthed.

Acree gestured a _What? It's the truth!_

Moonracer's optic ridges descended over unimpressed optics. _And unhelpful_ , she tried to convey.

From the way Arcee rolled her optics and crossed one leg over the other, Moonracer thought she understood just fine.

The door opened and Greenlight stepped through, her steps hurried. Moonracer felt her spark shrink. "Oh no," she moaned. " _Now_ what?"

Elita wanted to know the same. "What is it Greenlight?" she asked their communications officer without turning away from the window.

Greenlight hesitated, probably wondering if she should disturb the Prima Femme when she so obviously didn't need it. "I- have Ultra Magnus on the comm. Prima-"

"Tell him I'm busy," Elita told her. She sounded tired. More tired than Moonracer had ever heard her. Briefly she wondered if she was rolling escape plans around her processor, an imaginary _Starlight_ fighting Shockwave's very real army of attack drones currently scattered throughout Cybertron's atmosphere.

Still Greenlight didn't leave. Although she fidgeted enough that it was clear she wanted to. "He, um, he's not actually asking for you, Prima." She looked round the room until her optics found the trio of femmes gathered around the circuit slab. "He says he needs Moonracer, right away."


	10. Interludes of Lucidity

Hey guys, sorry to leave you hanging for an extra week, but you finally get to learn about the mysterious Spanner, so I hope you'll forgive me. Enjoy! :)

* * *

Across Bounding Interstellar Waves

...

10 – Interludes of Lucidity – 10

...

She walked into his lab like nothing had ever been wrong, even though it had was the reason she'd come in the first place.

"Hey Jackie," Moonracer said with only part of a soft smile where she leaned against the open frame of the door. "I heard you had a rough orbital cycle."

He didn't respond, but his hands paused their meaningless modifications. He should have known Magnus would have a way to handle him when he woke up. His...episode had ended with him beating poor Drivewinder senseless in place of the Shockwave Wheeljack had seen. It was like a switch had gone off in his central processor. One minute he was wrestling with the Decepticon, the next he was standing over a viciously beaten and bloodied mech he hardly knew. An orbital cycle later and he still didn't remember doing it.

They must have told her what he'd done, but even still she stood there so _easily_ , watching him with soft optics that he couldn't meet and saw in his recharge tremors. Her paint was thin, but bright, protoform silver showing through around her joints and digits where she frequently handled her different blasters. She favored her left leg and there was a restriction brace around that same knee. He wondered what had happened.

But she was beautiful. And for some reason that irritated him right now. Trapped in this slag pit and she was still just as lovely as ever.

"Come to tiptoe around my questionable sanity?" he wanted to snap, but he bit the ugly words back. It wasn't her fault the Wreckers handled him with extreme care now. Topspin didn't even bother to keep his safety on when they were in the same room.

"What are you doing here?" he asked instead, his voice low and lifeless, like a flat tire.

Moonracer pushed away from the door and swept forward with that grace of hers, none of it marred by a distinct limp and the whirr-and-click of the brace. She was obviously anxious, but she didn't shy away from him, which actually made _him_ nervous. It had become abundantly clear to everyone that he wasn't safe to be around. And that didn't even take into account this _connection_ he had with that thrice-slagged Swarm. No telling what Shockwave had done to him to get _that_ , but it surely spelled just as much danger to those around him as himself. Shockwave was sickeningly efficient that way.

If Moonracer had gotten the warning, she ignored it blithely and instead watched him with those concerned optics.

"I came to see you," she told him.

He almost believed her. "Ultra Magnus asked you to come."

Her mouth twitched ever so slightly. "Actually he screamed it at me over what sounded like a very large invasion." She tilted her head at him. "Something to do with your handiwork I take it?"

Her optics didn't flinch away from him when she said it. Wheeljack began to wonder if the same force that had damaged her knee had affected her processor.

She raised a hand as if to touch his arm when he didn't answer her, but stopped and pulled it back into her personal zone. Wheeljack couldn't tell if he was disappointed or relieved.

"Will you tell me about it?" she asked softly.

Wheeljack's hands paused again. Not, 'do you want to talk about it', like he had heard with annoying repetition since the episode ended. It smoothed some of his rough edges. It implied he still had some choice in the matter, and that she would respect that choice even if he gave her an answer she didn't like. He wasn't at all sure that she _would_ , but the allusion was nice in itself.

"I'm sure you've heard all about it already," he told her as he snapped part of a motor into place with a sharp clap. "Repetition isn't necessary."

He felt Moonracer look away. "I heard you beat Drivewinder within an inch of his internal energon," she said in a low voice. "What I want to know is why. Who did you think you were hitting?"

He felt her optics on him again and he resisted the urge to meet them. So far she'd been the only one to ask him that. Even Triage had written off his episode to lingering mental instability and left it at that.

 _But then she's always been cleverer than most bots credit her with._

He stared down at the intelligence Ultra Magnus had given him on Shockwave's drone net currently hovering in Cybertron's atmosphere, the figures making as much sense to him as his own mind at the moment.

"It was Shockwave," he finally told her. "I was in here, trying to work on the isolation field weapon-"

She gave a semi-nod. "The bubble-gun. Right."

He shot her an aggravated look, but continued. "The thing went off." He thumbed at the large dent in the wall behind him. "Next thing I knew I was back in Tyger Pax and Shockwave was standing over me."

She blinked as she took this in. "You had a flashback," she stated. "That's not uncommon. You know that."

He turned away from her, wanting to collapse in on himself and speed away, but the room didn't have room for his alt-mode. "It's not the same," he insisted. "Who else do you know of that cracks like that and turns on their own?"

She rolled her optics. "You're not dangerous-" she started.

Until he slammed his fist against the table, making his tools and the femme jump. "Then why is Drivewinder in medbay?" he shouted at her.

Moonracer didn't answer, but she could feel her sudden wariness as she watched him. It made him feel worse, like he had some need to _prove_ to her he wasn't safe to be around.

Wheeljack groaned and hung his head, a dull pounding starting in the back of his processor. "Why are you here?" he moaned. "You just- you keep coming back even after-" He stopped himself, digits curling tightly around one of his screwdrivers. He thumped the point of it into the table sharper than he'd meant to, the sound of it frightening himself. "You just keep coming back," he repeated in a torn up voice.

She was silent. He spun the screwdriver against the table.

When the question in his processor grew into an all-consuming need to know, he finally asked her, " _Why_?"

Moonracer's optics widened as she started ever so slightly, and then her temperature rose in a metal blush. "Because I-" she started, misunderstanding.

"No," Wheeljack cut her off, afraid of what she might admit. He lowered his voice, but couldn't ask what he wanted. He was too afraid of her answer. "I mean," he quickly switched words. "Why are you still here? Why haven't you run yet?"

She was silent for a long time. The divot in the table became deeper.

"I can hear them," he said when he couldn't stand her silence any longer. "I don't know why or even how, but they're loud as sirens."

Her optic ridges creased together. This time she did put her hand on his vambrace, maybe to make up for her silence, maybe in relief that he hadn't waited. "Who Wheeljack?"

He put his hand to his forehead, dislodging hers in the process. "The Swarm," he reminded her. "I can hear them... _chattering_ to each other like- like old sparks. And it's only getting worse. We ran into them orbit before yesterday and they were even _louder_. They never _shut up_ -" He raised the screwdriver to slam into the table, but surprisingly strong fingers stopped him in the air.

He clapped his other hand over hers and, with effort, made himself drop the screwdriver before the Swarm in him figured out how to use it.

"I know that," Moonracer told him softly. He could feel her eyes on him. "You told me, remember? When you first came back to yourself."

He scowled furiously at his tools. "But they're still in there, Moonracer, the whole Swarm, in my head."

" _Shockwave_ put them there-" she protested.

"But I can't make them leave!" he shouted, tossing her off and stomping a safe distance away before turning around again and jerking his thumb at his chestplates. "I'm not safe to be around." He cut out every word. "I thought that was crystal clear at this point, but you keep _coming back_." He threw up his hands, distressed huffs escaping out his vents. "No matter what you see, you keep coming back..."

The fight went out of him, like helium out of a punctured balloon. He stopped, leaning his palms against the scarred surface of the table. But he still kept the table between him and Moonracer.

"Why-" He couldn't look at her, couldn't stop himself from whispering. "Why do you still want me?"

Arms clamped across her frame, standing rigid where he'd left her, Moonracer looked like he'd just asked her to walk naked in front of the High Council instead of a simple question.

"Because I love you, you bolts-for-brains idiot!" The words he was terrified to hear boiled out of her.

Wheeljack stared at her, rising warmth quickly followed by a wash of cold terror. She looked away, optics flaring in tightly reigned emotion, but couldn't keep her optics from him. "I know it's stupid-"

It was, but his spark sank anyway hearing her say it too.

"-I know you already love another femme-"

The sinking paused. He did?

She must have caught the confusion in his optics because she forced air out stiff vents and covered her mouth before collecting herself enough to go on.

"I know about Spanner," she told him, voice threatening to break. "You kept calling me by her name when we found you."

Wheeljack remembered, though he really wished he didn't. He'd blocked out all those unimportant little details, why couldn't he forget this one too?

He stared at her, drifting like he was no longer connected to the floor. "Spanner?" he finally heard himself say. "You think I love...Spanner?"

She looked up at the ceiling, biting her lips closed, and nodded quickly.

 _"Don't do it,"_ he told himself. _"Keep it to yourself."_ But it was too much.

"Ha!"

Wheeljack's laugh shredded through the quiet in the room. It was a grating, wheezy sound, rough from long disuse, but he still couldn't stop.

Moonracer stared at him, gaping. Was he...was he _laughing_ at her? After what she'd said? _Did Shockwave spark-swap Wheeljack for Sunstreaker?_

Before she could lay into him, Wheeljack's rasping wheeze was replaced by rasping words. "Spanner wasn't my sweetspark."

With that blasted mask he always wore, Moonracer couldn't see his face, but she heard some form of smile in his voice – bereaved or relieved it was impossible to tell.

"She wasn't?"

Wheeljack looked at her and shook his head. There was definitely a bittersweet tinge to his optics this time. "No," he repeated.

"She was Ratchet's daughter."

...

Moonracer needed to sit down.

"Ratchet...has a daughter?"

Wheeljack flinched. "Had," he corrected.

Moonracer looked down, feeling foolish. "She died in the war," she murmured, for the first time glad that Ratchet wasn't here to hear her misstep. Everybot had lost someone once Megatron came to power. So many lights had been extinguished...

"No." Wheeljack surprised her again. "Long before all this." He swept a hand to take in the decay surrounding them.

Moonracer stared at him, central processor threatening to run in loops. Ratchet had a daughter... _Ratchet_ had a _daughter_.

She let herself fall back against the wall behind her and hissed out air as she slid down to the ground, legs bending at the knees as she sank. "I don't believe this," she muttered, trying to reconcile the image of cantankerous, grumpy, wrench-slinging Ratchet with heel-struts and glitter paint. "I mean, it's _Ratchet_."

She looked up to find Wheeljack standing next to her. "How?" she stammered.

The engineer followed her down to the floor, the scrape of metal on metal not raucous enough to make it through Moonracer's shock. "He adopted her," he said. "Her femme-creator extinguished on his table at Iacon Central from an overdose. No one knew what to do with her, so when Ratchet announced he was keeping her. You know how he is. No one had the internal wiring to argue with him."

Slowly coming out of her mental cloud, Moonracer asked, "Was...was she a lot like me?"

Wheeljack's huff of laughter told her more than actual words. "No," came his immediate response. "Not really. Maybe in the heat of battle when you get that scary look in your optics, but it's only a passing resemblance."

Moonracer wasn't sure if that was a relief or not. "She was a tough femme then?"

Wheeljack nodded, one arm looped around a bent knee as he watched the distant past. "Span was...daring. Adventurous. There was nothing she couldn't do if she decided she wanted to do it." He rolled his head to face her, head fin ringing against the wall. His optics were laughing. "It drove Ratchet crazy."

A small smile twitched at Moonracer's faceplates, but it was a mechanical gesture. "She sounds unstoppable." _Nothing like me at all._

Wheeljack gave a slow nod. A long, weary sigh escaped him as he reached back and scraped a palm against the ridges of his helm. "But she was also sick. Her femma was circuit boosting and it warped Spanner's spark chamber, left her open to flare fits that could melt her from the inside. They're treatable, but only if you catch them in time. And once..." He exhaled again, his words riding along with it. "...they didn't.

"She was out with friends, getting into Primus-only-knows what kind of trouble, when she had a fit. Her _friends_ -" He bit the word out. "-got scared and left her in some back alleyway alone. One of them called Ratchet half a breem later from an attack of consciousness and told him where she was, but by then it was too late. She died a few cycles after we found her."

Moonracer sat there quietly, trying to take it in. _Poor Ratchet..._ she thought. _No wonder he's so unhappy._

Wheeljack's last words finally registered in her processor. "Wait, you were there too?"

Wheeljack nodded. "I only had a few more orns before I finished my med-caste training under Ratchet. That's how I met them both. Ratchet was my caste appointed instructor – makes you wonder what he did to deserve that kind of punishment, yeah? – and Spanner dropped by after her shifts at the pharmacy dispensary so they could drive home together."

"Did you like her?" She tried to say it like she was teasing, but she forgot how once half the words were already out her mouth.

Wheeljack shrugged. "Maybe in an older-femme-crush sort of way, but that was before I got to know the femme under the black-and-neon paintjob. When that withered up, somehow we were friends."

Moonracer's processor was perfectly quiet, possibly for the first time ever in her life cycle. What were you supposed to think when the missing core of your spark called you another femme's name and she turned out to be the daughter of his best friend who tragically and needlessly died?

Something pulled at her digits and Moonracer gave a small start. She looked down, expecting to see an over-fed frizz-rat experimentally nibbling at her paint, but there was none. No twitching whiskers, no beady red optics, no snaky tail.

Dark gray digits were laced between her lighter ones. She had no memory of taking Wheeljack's hand, and from the look on his face neither did he. _Must've happened when I wasn't looking..._ she heard her processor mumble like it was whole different bot.

It was probably the same bot that had pulled her sidearm out of subspace when she'd been distracted.

Wheeljack went stiff, seeing the danger pointed at his t-cog about the same time she did.

"Sorry!" she immediately started to babble as she dropped it back into her subspace. "Sorry I- well I thought it was a frizz-rat, only it wasn't. It was you. Well, your hand, which is still connected to the rest of you so it's still technically _you_ and, um, ah-"

She went to scratch the ridge of her nasal plating out of nervous habit, only to almost smack herself in the face with Wheeljack's hand when she forgot to let go first. She tried to let go, then worried he might think she was trying to shake him off, tightened her grip on his digits just as he tried to let go in what could only be described as the clumsiest handshake in Cybertron's history.

They somehow disentangled their hands and Moonracer, in horror, heard the most embarrassing burst of laughter jump out her mouth. _Okay, even I'd ditch me at this point._

Horrified that that might be true, she lurched to her feet, hands clasped safely out of the way behind her back.

"I should, um-" She pointed at the closed door, already backing towards it. "I really need to, ah, to deal with those frizz-rats so I'll, I'll just see you tomorrow and-"

The door closing cut off her panicked verbal flow. She stood there for a cycle, staring at it, picturing Wheeljack sitting where she'd left him, watching her with bright optics. She had no idea what he'd been thinking through that mortifying display of insanity, what he must be thinking right this very cycle on the other side of the door. She certainly couldn't tell with that blasted mask covering most of his face.

She leaned her helm against the door with a metallic thump, a whine hiccuping out her vocorder.

"You almost shot your crush," she reminded herself bitterly, just soft enough that Wheeljack couldn't hear her through the door. "Biggest. Moment killer. Ever."

She enunciated each word with another thump against the door.


	11. Sugar in the Fuel Tank

Hey guys! Sorry I'm late this week. The long weekend completely threw me off of everything. But chapter eleven turned out nice and long so I hope you'll forgive me. n_n Read and enjoy!

* * *

Across Bounding Interstellar Waves

...

11 – Sugar in the Fuel Tank – 11

...

It wasn't until late that night, lying in her borrowed bunk and staring sleeplessly up at the ceiling, that Moonracer realized she'd told Wheeljack she loved him.

And that he hadn't even acknowledged that she had.

 _"Scrap, scrap, scrappity-scrap!"_ Her central processor went into hysterics while her face burned so bright with embarrassment she was sure she could use it as a landing beacon. " _What possessed you? Why did you think that could possibly help anything?"_

She covered her face with both hands and rolled over on her side, facing the wall. Not for the first time she wished she'd accepted Molly's offer to come with her. " _At least then I'd have someone to talk to. Now it's just me and a bunch of emotionally wrecked Wreckers."_

She lay there for the next hour, trying to lull her processor into a false sense of security enough that she could slip into recharge mode without it noticing. But a stray circuit kept sparking, some thought she couldn't pin down niggling at her processer like a virus.

 _"The Swarm_ ," she heard Wheeljack's voice say clearly in her memory banks. _"I can hear them...chattering to each other like- like old sparks. And it's only getting worse. We ran into them orbit before yesterday and they were even louder-_

The scene looped from there, repeating over and over in her head like a broken recording. " _The Swarm...I can hear them...And it's only getting worse...ran into them orbit before yesterday...even louder..."_

 _Swarm_

 _Worse_

 _Orbit_

 _Before..._

"Yesterday?"

Moonracer's optics shot open, flaring bright in the dark as she kicked her legs off the bunk and threw herself to the door. She flung her head out and looked wildly around the hall for someone.

One mech had stopped, one foot still in the air and his two rocket launchers zeroing in on her with startled alarm.

Moonracer barely noticed as she shouted at the Wrecker, "Where's Ultra Magnus?"

...

Ultra Magnus stood with his hands clasped behind his back, watching the slender femme where she sat in Blaster's usual chair. The mech himself was standing next to her, watching in poorly hidden irritation as the femme watched and re-watched his symbiote Rewind's recordings of the most recent run-in with the Swarm.

After the seventh time, the commander revved his engine. "Is there a reason you had to see this _now_ , Moonracer?" he asked directly.

"Yeah," Blaster put in sourly. "This midnight viewing's cutting into my recharge shift and I gotta get these tapes back to the little guy before he wakes up and sees they're missing. He'll freak if I don't."

The femme ignored them both as she flopped back into the bucket chair, arms hanging over the side as she stared at the image of the Swarm frozen on the monitor.

"I don't get it," she said to herself rather than them. "It can't _be_..."

Magnus shuttered his optics and curtly waved off another scathing reply from his communications mech. "What can't be?" he asked.

She counted something off on her digits. "Half orbit's travel to get here, medbay all that morning and orbit before, and then the Hydrax Plateau the day before that...makes it the orbit before yesterday."

Magnus vented hot air with a motorized grumble. "Moonracer..." he ground out.

She kicked off from the console and swung around to face them, a hard set to her optics. "I hate to break it to you guys, but that wasn't the Swarm you met three days ago."

Magnus and Blaster shared a look, one wearing his incredulity more openly than the other. "Then what do you call that thing?" Blaster demanded, pointing at the still image on the screen. The grainy outline of the insecticon that had given Wheeljack his tool could barely be seen against the dark background.

She shook her head. "I don't know, but it can't be the Swarm."

Ultra Magnus narrowed his optics. "Why?"

"Because three days ago, the thing was chasing us down on the Hyrax Plateau, half a planet away."

Her words killed whatever late-night conversation still in the room. Two of them? There were two of them now?

It was Blaster that finally spoke the one thought left in everyone's processor.

"Well ain't that just sugar in the fuel tank? We're ain't ever gonna get outta here in one piece now. Those things are gonna eat us alive!"

...

News spread through the base like grease fire, and there was no shortage of talk about the new Swarm the following afternoon when Wheeljack poked his head out of the lab he'd taken shelter in since his fit. He would have stayed longer if his fuel gauge hadn't registered empty since the night before.

 _For Wreckers, they sure gossip like spark drones_ , Wheeljack thought as he stuck to the edge of the Mess, watching the scattering of mechs that was always around, but not engaging. Whirl was over on the other side, staring at him in that unnerving way of his, but Springer was between him and Wheeljack, so that should keep the insane heli-mech from doing anything...Whirl-like. Topspin, thank Primus, was nowhere to be seen.

"Hey," a mech's deep bass voice came directly behind his shoulder. "Move," he ordered.

Wheeljack turned, preparing himself-

-and was surprised to see someone he actually wanted to talk to.

"Roadbuster!" he said, a little louder then he'd meant. "You're up!"

And up, and up, and up. _Dang_ , the mech was tall. And broad. Wheeljack's back kibble barely stretched as far as Roadbuster's shoulders.

The mech inclined his square head, but didn't say anything. That wasn't unusual. Roadbuster was just as known for his withdrawn silence off the battlefield as he was for his heroism and courage on it.

 _"As long as the next sound he makes isn't_ ow," Wheeljack thought, eyeing the foot long rent in his chest armor, the gleam of medical staples shining underneath.

"Should, uh, you be up already?" Wheeljack asked, running a low-sensitivity scan on the wound he'd partly caused to fix the more dangerous damage underneath. Roadbuster reached up and idly scratched at the staples, making flecks of paint rain down to the floor. He shrugged the opposite shoulder. "Triage was wearing on my nerves," he said.

Wheeljack nodded, understanding completely. "Bet you never thought you'd miss Ratchet's sparkling personality, huh?"

"Hrm," Roadbuster revved his engine in agreement, then, after waiting a moment for Wheeljack to move, came around him and grabbed a sealed energon cube from the dispenser Wheeljack was blocking. Then he left to claim a table.

Wheeljack grabbed his own, glad no one else was behind him, and wondered if that was the end of their conversation. He turned to leave, thinking he'd just refuel back in his lab, when Roadbuster met his optics and jerked his chin at him in a silent, "You coming or what?"

With another quick glance around the room to make sure Topspin hadn't appeared, he went and joined Roadbuster.

"So," he said slowly as he set his energon cube down with a plastic-y _click_ , "what do you make of this second Swarm?"

Roadbuster punctured the top of his cube with a field knife, turned it around, then did the same on the other side. "Twice the outdoor fun."

Wheeljack huffed a little humor as he yanked the top of his own cube off by the more conventional pull tab. "Leave it to you to look forward to taking down something as impossible as the Swarm." He took a pull of energon and made a face behind his mask. Stale. Almost impossible to drink. "Ugh, they leave it any longer and it'll be high grade."

"They must've pulled it out of storage too soon."

Wheeljack chuckled, taking another drink anyway. "Why do you think there's two of them?" he asked after another span of silence. "You think Shockwave's producing more or this one's made of spare parts or...?" He trailed off, staring at the ceiling as he tried to think of what else Shockwave could want by releasing two hunger-driven monstrosities on their already ravaged home.

Roadbuster took a long drink, apparently not bothered by the musty taste. "Does it matter?" he asked as he set the half-empty cube down.

Wheeljack stared down into his own. He swirled it once, watching the light add a brownish-yellow hue to neon green liquid. "No," he sighed. "I guess not. They'll either kill us or we'll escape in those ships command scrounged up."

The big mech spun his cube to keep the energon from separating, liquid sloshing up the flat sides. "Or we'll kill them," he said. "It's what we're here for, after all."

Wheeljack looked over his cube at him, but decided he didn't want to pick an fight with the only mech still willing to talk to him. Instead he looked around the Mess again. Springer was leaving, taking Whirl with him for good measure, and Topspin was still nowhere to be see. Maybe Twin Twist was running interference for some reason.

"Expecting someone?" Roadbuster's deep voice broke into his thoughts.

Wheeljack looked down at his cube, wrapping both hands around its sides and shifting in his seat. "No," he answered. "Just don't want to run into the Jumpstarters." His optics flicked up but he didn't raise his head. "Topspin wouldn't mind having my head on the wall and I don't know if Twin Twist would help him or not."

"Oh. That." Roadbuster polished off his energon. "Topspin's gone. Left last night."

Wheeljack frowned thoughtfully as he straightened up. "I haven't heard anything about a new offense. Where'd he go?"

"Looking for the second Swarm."

"Alone?" The word was shocked out of him. Even the Jumpstarter wasn't _that_ foolhardy, was he?

Roadbuster slanted him a don't-be-an-idiot look. "No. He and Twin Twist are escorting that femme from Praxis while they recon this new Swarm. Apparently she knows how to follow the beastie without getting its attention."

The jar to his spark nearly laid him out senseless. _Femme from Praxis-_ "Moonracer?" he yelled. "They left to find the Swarm with _Moonracer_?" He nearly lost his energon right there.

The Wrecker slowly blinked at him. "As her escort, yeah."

Wheeljack almost didn't hear him. _Much good an escort will do her if they attract that thing's attention_ , he thought already half blind with panic. Maybe he could catch up. She had almost seven breems head start. Three-quarters of an orbital cycle, that wasn't too bad. He could catch up, find her, and drag her back where-

 _Where she would kick my can for ruining her mission objective and getting us more information on this second insecticon swarm_ , his rational brain kicked in before he could race after her.

Roadbuster was watching him intently and Wheeljack resisted the telling urge to fidget.

"I was wondering," the Wrecker said slowly, probably because he rarely said those words in that order. "You and her. You a, pair?"

He almost said, "No, we're an apple," before he realized Hound and Aria weren't around to laugh at the joke. Instead he just shook his head without lifting it. "No," he said wearily. Moonracer's voice, slightly distressed, started circling in his audios, _"I love you you bolts-for-brains idiot!"_

Roadbuster watched him. "You want to be?"

Wheeljack didn't answer.

He rose once he pulled himself together enough to realize he was tired of talking. "I'm going to...go back to the lab..." he decided, rising from the table.

Roadbuster made a small noise and waved a hand at him. The other was scratching at his staples again.

"Hey." Roadbuster's hail had Wheeljack turning back around. The Wrecker was watching him, a grim set to his mouth. "I hear you can talk to the Swarm."

Wheeljack felt his spark chamber constrict in fear. It wasn't a question. He didn't have to answer.

He nodded anyway, unable to meet his optics.

Roadbuster didn't look away, but he did nod. "Good," he said, like this was some kind of answer.

Wheeljack felt his mouth drop open. His optics brightened incredulously and he flexed his digits, not sure what to do with them. "Good?" he repeated loudly. "I can talk to a homicidal eating machine intent on killing us all and you say _good_?"

Roadbuster stared at him like he was having another fit. Then, "Yeah."

He slammed his hands on the table. " _Yeah_?" Wheeljack nearly shouted.

The Wrecker's mouth thinned in annoyance. "Your processor on a loop?" he demanded dully. "Yeah, I mean _good_. If you couldn't talk to the bugs I'd be dead, doc. And I don't think too much of that."

So many conflicting emotions started to tighten inside Wheeljack's chest and it was all he could do to sink back down across from Roadbuster. Shame and horror were blatant and familiar, but they warred with a truly strange sense of grateful relief. It was highly unwelcome, and more than a little sickening to the engineer. To be grateful to be connected to the Swarm. _Grateful_ to share an unwanted bond with that monster-

But Roadbuster would be dead. Stuck on that battlefield, under attack by that swarm of voracious insecticons, he would have bled out before anyone would have enough breathing space to help him. His frame would have been eaten, his innermost energon consumed. Their friend's remains would feed their enemy and whatever was left would rust and decay surrounded by ruin.

 _Lost so much already, too many friends and brothers, all gone. Losing one more is like a bullet creeping through the brain pan; no instant kill, but it gets you in a slow end. Like Spanner. Like Ironfist..._

Thinking about it all made his spark flicker too fast, and he felt ill. It was horrific, what Shockwave had done – to him, with the Swarm – nothing good could come from something like that. But Roadbuster- Roadbuster was still here-

Still here and staring at him.

He managed to speak without puking. "I told you. I'm an engineer, not a doctor."

Roadbuster leveled a heavy look at him. "If you were an engineer you'd fix my energon harvester," he retorted. "The shells keep jamming. It'll blow in my face if something isn't done." He lifted his optic ridges at the mech across the table. "I don't suppose you've reconsidered...?" He spun his empty cube around by one digit.

"Sure," Wheeljack agreed without thinking. "Sure just, leave it by my door and I'll- I'll do something with it." He had no idea _what_ , but given Roadbuster's attachment to the temperamental shotgun, he'd have to figure something out just to keep the Wrecker's face un-scrapped.

Roadbuster nodded his thanks, then pressed his palms flat against the table to leverage himself to his feet. "Triage sense is tingling," he said. "Better get back." He picked up his empty cube, scratching at his staples again as he eyed Wheeljack's faceplates. "You don't look so good," he observed. "Maybe you should come with me."

Wheeljack dragged himself back to the present enough to meet his optics. "Only if you stop scratching your staples."

Roadbuster smiled wryly at him, and then left with an amiable wave of his free hand.

Wheeljack held himself together long enough to be sure his friend was gone, and then hung his head in shaking hands to wait out the wave of revulsion that overtook him.

...

The second Swarm's trail was as blatant as its partner's and they had no trouble picking it up in the suburbs skirting Altihex near where the Wreckers had encountered it. With Topspin scouting ahead, they followed it away from the city, skirted the Sea of Rust, and picked it up again before following it deep into the remains of Tagan Heights.

"Does he see the thing yet?" Moonracer asked breathlessly as she and Twin Twist picked their way through the heavy rubble. They were at the bottom of a deep valley – Smelter's Valley probably, but she didn't know for certain – and all around them pieces of cauldron's and heat-protected piping lay at the center of spider's web of cracks; landing areas where some desperate spark had used them as projectiles.

Twin Twist went still as he flung the question at his brother and waited for a reply. Moonracer had heard others question the wisdom of having a pair of branch-sparks on the front line, brother's that felt what the other did whether they wanted to or not, but when it came to communication she couldn't think of a better, more secure method. Not even Soundwave could hack into _that_ channel.

 _And I'm not sure he'd want to if he could_ , Moonracer thought as she watched Twin Twist's faceplates twitch as his brother undoubtedly threw a colorful answer back at him.

"He says if he'd found a gigantic eating machine, you'd know, so stop asking," Twin Twist told her, his usual anxious energy returning as he started up again.

Moonracer shot him a quick look as she tested a toe hold. "He said that? Exactly?"

The blue and white Wrecker shrugged, dislodging a slew of minor rubble from the rockslide they were navigating. "I may have paraphrased a bit."

She looked at him again before heaving herself up another few yards. "Since when do you _paraphrase_?" she demanded.

"Since Ultra Magnus reminded us you could pick the whiskers off a frizz-rat from two hundred yards away. Well, that and the nice ones always snap when you least expect it."

That actually got a hard laugh out of her. "And don't think that isn't true," she told him, an edge in her voice that wasn't usually there. She felt close to snapping as it was and her temper was brittle at best. The only thing keeping her focused so far was the danger of the Swarm.

The Swarm...and Wheeljack's unexplained connection to it. _"Of course Shockwave had something to do with it, but I just don't understand why? What's he get out of tying an Autobot into the command structure of his new bruiser?"_

She snuck a look up at her escort, a question popping into her head. _"Awful personal..._ " she cautioned herself.

"Can I ask?" she asked him anyway, vents whirring harder as she climbed.

"Ask what?"

Moonracer hesitated, looking up at his back. "Having someone else in your head. What's it like?"

Twin Twist peered down at her briefly, then shrugged. "Oh, that. Depends on the mech."

"Topspin?"

Twin Twist's engine revved when a handhold gave way. He steadied himself before answering. "He's loud, abrasive, and completely full of himself." He grinned down at her. "But then, so am I.

"That and it could be worse," he added. "It could be Whirl."

Moonracer made a face to herself. _"Could be worse than Whirl..."_ she thought.

"I mean, can you imagine being tapped into that psycho's every thought and feeling? I mean, bots think _I'm_ lewd, you should see what he writes on the garage walls when he thinks no one's looking. Ultra Magnus read one once, and fell straight into stasis lock."

Moonracer wasn't listening. _Tapped into every thought and feeling..._ Was that why Wheeljack was so disturbed about the Swarm? Of course he'd told her he could hear its mental voices, and she'd heard he'd compelled one of the insecticons in a way only seen in symbiotes and their over-sparks, and of course that all pointed to some kind of spark connection, but she just hadn't realized...

Her optics widened, floating dust irritating her irises. _"Maybe that even explains some of his seizures. If the Swarm got too close- with all those minds trying to talk over him, drowning him out- it would make anybody crazy."_

"Do you think that's how he could control the insecticon in Altihex?" she probed.

The Wrecker shrugged, then lifted his bulk onto a small shelf. "Well it's either that or he's a traitor."

Moonracer jolted as if stung. "Is that what you think?"

The arrogant grin that had been on his face since they'd left the base finally disappeared. "He saved Roadbuster," Twin Twist reminded her. "That counts for something."

He held out a hand to her and Moonracer took it, pulling herself up after him. "I forgot you two are friends," she said after a moment of rest on the shelf.

"Regular battlefield brothers," Twin Twist affirmed.

"And Topspin?"

Twin Twist sighed, grunting as he searched out another hold above his head. "Like I said before. Load, abrasive, and full of himself. He thinks anybot that would tie himself to a bunch of bugs has more than a few himself. And one that would attack his friends for them? Completely nuts and bolts."

She flinched at the harsh words. "Wheeljack's not crazy," she mumbled.

Already a few feet above her, Twin Twist didn't hear.

"You know," he started again, returning to less emotional conversation, "we thought it was kinda weird." He huffed before ducking his head so that a minor slew of gravel bounced off the back of his helm instead of his face. "Since when does Ultra Mags caution us about being _nice_? He got a soft spot under all that armor for you, femmeling?"

She felt his optics land on the back of her neck an stubbornly ignored them. "It's the face," she told him instead, refusing to look at him. "I look like everyone's younger sister." She inclined her head. "Even if they don't _have_ any sisters."

Twin Twist shot her a grin, swinging around to face her so he only held onto the landslide with one hand. "Too adorable for your own good?" he asked, a sly glint in his optics. "Certainly too adorable for mine."

She thinned her lips, feeling the edge grow sharper. "Don't go there, Twin Twist," she warned him.

He rolled his optics and started climbing again. "What? You gonna send your core-spark after me?" He cackled a laugh, undoubtedly meaning Ultra Magnus. She knew he was no more serious than if he'd offered to dress as a frizz-rat for her to demonstrate her sharpshooting on.

Moonracer ducked her head and concentrated on climbing out of the landslide blocking the far end of the valley.

Tagan Heights was an old industrial town, with whole districts dedicated to smelting, iron works, ammunitions and armor. It was all fed by three enormous forges, each connected like red-orange pools in a vertical fountain cascading down the side of an immense cliff, continuously refining every metal in existence. All of the best metalwork – from art to construction material to frame alloy – came out of Tagan Heights.

Or at least it had. All of the resource hot spots – Tagan Heights, Crystal City, the Hydrax Plateau – had been targeted early in the war by the Decepticons, first to feed their then minor rebellion, and then later, if the Council militia or even the locals held out too well, for destruction so those valuable resources couldn't be used against them.

Tagan Heights, with its fortifications and natural defenses, had held out the longest, and it showed. Most of the living areas and little workshops were buried beneath the landslide Moonracer and Twin Twist were climbing, pummeled or buried in the final upheaval. The forgeries themselves, set into the cliff face as they were, were still intact as far as Moonracer could see, but had gone cold, metal hanging in useless drips like icicles from their gutters.

Someone must have tried to use the liquid metal as a weapon against the Decepticons during the final takeover, because halfway up the face one of the gutters had been blown and slung askew, spraying molten metal in a downward arc.

Unfortunately it never made it to the slope. Someone had just as quickly frozen the red-hot spew, leaving it in almost artistic sprays of unrefined steel.

"Hey." Moonracer paused, looking up at Twin Twist. He had that faraway look on his face again that meant Topspin was speaking.

Twin Twist started scrambling up about the same time Moonracer got a ping on her sensors. "Drone," Twin Twist identified the blip even as she hurried to follow him. "Shockwave must be keeping an optic on his new toy too."

They hurried up and ducked out of sight beneath one of the lower sprays of cooled metal. The femme leaned against the hard spray, taking weight off her aching knee as she tried to hush her cooling systems. The strained joint ached, but not nearly as badly as it should have. Whatever Triage had done before she'd left had obviously been worth it.

They waited. Four cycles passed before Moonracer picked up the faint warbling buzz at the lower edge of her hearing. It grew steadily louder – the drone must be following the same slope they were – and she caught a blue light flicker over the rocks outside from a scan light.

The blue light streaked past the streaks of metal, and both Autobots ducked away from it, hiding in the nooks it couldn't reach. Moonracer pressed herself against the lukewarm metal and repressed her ambient noise. The light swiveled, taking in as much of the hollow space as possible...and then was dragged back outside. The warble of the drone's hoverlifts rose, and then receded as it continued on its preprogrammed path.

They waited another few cycles before shifting. Keeping one shoulder pressed against the arc, Moonracer leaned one optic around the side just in time to see the pale blue hide of the drone disappear behind part of a ruined boiler.

She leaned back and drew a rectangle in the air for Twin Twist to see. _Sentinel_.

The mech grinned and smashed one fist into his palm.

She shook her head and pointed at her audio. _Too loud. Might alert the Swarm._

Twin Twist sneered in disappointment, but stayed where he was.

When they were sure nothing would draw the sentinel drone back, they crept back into the open. Twin Twist took a moment to contact his brother, then jerked his chin to the side. "Tops says the thing's headed in a general arc. We can get ahead of it and set up camp to watch its movements."

"And stay out of the drone's sensor path." Moonracer nodded. "Let's go."

...

They found an intersection still intact enough to set up. Moonracer took the high point, ignoring the fleeting sensation of deju vu she felt when she took her place on the tower balcony. Looking out across the square, she pushed aside the vivid memory of falling down that delivery chute at Hydrax and concentrated on what she saw.

The building designs were antiquated, even by pre-war standards, but the bots of Tagan Heights had been practical, and why bother re-building something when it was still perfectly functional? Hers was a kind of upscale living quarters. The rooms she'd peeked into had either been stripped bare or completely abandoned, chairs still pushed back from when their owners had been startled out of them.

Topspin had taken up residence in an old factory sitting caddy-corner from her, to increase their chances of getting a comprehensive view of the new creature. Although Moonracer as sure that the mech had taken time to walk through the working levels of the place to see if anything of use had been left by the scavengers that had picked the place over.

This high up, high octane winds blasted through the narrow streets, chilling Moonracer through her armor. She shivered, her internal systems heating up to compensate. She flicked her optics up and down the street where she crouched behind the thick, decorative railing of the balcony. _Where is he?_ she asked herself. _At the rate of speed the thing was making, it and Topspin should have been here ten cycles ago._

The plating between her shoulder blades heated in unease and she resisted the urge to scratch.

"I don't like this..." Twin Twist's voice murmured in Moonracer's audio. "They're taking too long."

"Well it is a mindless monster," Moonracer murmured back, trying to smooth her own rough edges as much as his. "Maybe it took a detour. What's Topspin say?"

Twin Twist didn't have to wait for an answer. "Nothing. He's keeping quiet. But he feels...uneasy."

Moonracer shifted feeling back into her feet. He wasn't the only one, but she couldn't bring herself to say so.

"We give them five more cycles," she told him instead. "If they're not here by then we'll have to set up somewhere else anyway." Twin Twist sent a nonverbal confirmation.

It was another three before the sound of the wind changed. It ran full tilt down the narrow corridor between buildings and then stopped with what sounded like a supply train ramming into a solid wall. Moonracer hedged her optics over the top of the rail just as Twin Twist's grim voice whispered, "It's here."

It choked off the opposite end of the street like a liquid wall. Black and shifting, like its counterpart, she could feel the buzz of the multitude of insecticons pressing on her audios, making her teeth vibrate.

Slowly, she slid back behind the balustrade and triggered the magnification in her optic shields. She peered between the rails as she waited for them to focus on the swarm.

She frowned when she got a better look at them. "They're faces are more...intact then the others'," she observed over the comm. line, recorded and streamed to one of Blaster's outposts for insurance measures. "So are their bodies. The ones I can see all have whole sets of wings too."

"I see three different frame types," Twin Twist added. "Chompers, Rammers, and Jumpers. As far as I can tell, they have individual bodies, but they still crawl all over each other."

"Like a school of rust fish," Moonracer mumbled, turning her attention to the haze surrounding this second group. "Well their wings work, at least some of them. There's a group that keeps flying around the others."

"Maybe a kind of vanguard," Twin Twist mused.

Moonracer made a noncommittal sound, distracted by something she'd seen past the flutter of wings and legs. She reached up and carefully increased the magnification on her shields.

"I think there's some kind of hollow space at their center." Twin Twist was still recording information. "I can make out...something in there. A figure maybe. Their leader?"

She barely heard him. The insecticons she could see kept looking at something. _Something's wrong_...

"Where's Topspin?" she asked, unease growing.

"Waiting at the back corner."

She focused in on the individual insecticon faces, saw multiple optics flick in the same direction again, behind them.

"Tell him to get out there."

"What? Why?" His voice was a little louder that time. She caught several antenna twitch in his direction.

Moonracer was already shutting away her own equipment, backing up into the apartment behind her without rising. "Because, it knows we're here."

As soon as the words were out, the swarm dissolved, exploding outward into a choking cloud of buzzing, flying insecticons.


	12. Matching Set

:)

* * *

Across Bounding Interstellar Waves

12 - Matching Set - 12

...

"Invention, it must be humbly admitted, does not consist in creating out of void, but out of chaos."

Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley

...

He was wrist-deep in a security interface someone had left outside his door when the door alert sounded. Wheeljack stopped, raising his head in confusion. No one had even come down this hallway since his arrival. "Hello?" he called out. Then thinking the door would just get in the way of their conversation added, "It's open."

The door slid sideways, and Ultra Magnus stepped through.

Wheeljack's wrench slipped right out of his fingers and bounced to the floor with a ringing clang. "Commander?" he asked before shaking himself out of his stupor. "What, uh, what're you doing here?" It seemed marginally politer than 'what do you want?'

Ultra Magnus cast his optics around the lab without moving the rest of his body, and then stepped inside with purpose. He had his hands clasped behind his back.

 _"Probably to keep from rearranging my hand tools according to size."_

Ultra Magnus gave Wheeljack a sharp look and the engineer stiffened, for a moment honestly thinking the Wrecker Commander had actually heard his thoughts. But then he remembered this was how Magnus just looked at people.

"I came to see if you've made any progress with Shockwave's drone net," he stated.

Wheeljack stared at him. " _Drone net...? Oh, right."_ The aerial drones hovering in grid formation high in Cybertron's atmosphere that shot down anything that rose above a measly three thousand feet. "Uh, no sir. I, um, haven't had much luck with them."

Ultra Magnus pinned him with a look like a nano-fly to a display board, a deep, unhappy sound rumbling out of his engine.

"It er, it would help a lot if I could actually get my hands on one of them, see how they run with my own optics," Wheeljack stuttered out. "There's hardly any useful information recorded on them and, uh, most of that's from Whirl so..."

From the severe angle of his mouth, Ultra Magnus knew exactly what he meant. He also couldn't help. "No one's gotten close enough to take one down and they've proven impossible to pick off from the ground. Whirl only got as close as he did because...well, he's Whirl. He takes laser bolts like they're energon candy then serves you up double."

"Probably because he has too much time on his hands," Wheeljack muttered as he shook his head at the image containing the remains of a sentinel, a metal brassiere strapped around its dented head and something bright pink smeared clumsily around its mouth. "Someone should find that guy a shrink." He flicked the image away.

Ultra Magnus's engine hiccupped at the idea. "Like I don't have enough traumatized mechs on my servos," he said before stiffly turning to leave.

"Ultra Magnus!" Wheeljack surprised himself calling out so abruptly. The big mech stopped, staring at him over a shoulder guard.

Wheeljack tried not to be intimidated. "Have you heard anything from Moonracer and the Jumpstarters?"

The red and blue mech's optics narrowed and Wheeljack thought it was his usual annoyance with bots that didn't use the procedural structure he was so proud of. But there were little stress marks creasing the corners of his optic shutters that weren't usually there, ones that hinted at a much deeper concern.

"They checked in early this morning. They've trailed the second Swarm to Tagan Heights and should catch up with it by tonight at the latest. If everything goes smooth they'll start their return journey tomorrow."

He stopped so suddenly Wheeljack thought he was afraid he'd said too much. The engineer nodded, grateful for the information even as it made his servos tighten, and Magnus disappeared with a semi-awkward air that would be gone by the time he reached the corner.

Wheeljack hardly noticed his absence as he stared down at the bits and pieces littering his table without seeing them. Tonight at the latest he'd said...that meant they could be watching the insecticons right now.

He gripped the table's edge harder. _"They're fine,"_ he told himself. _"If they stay out of sight, it'll never know it's being watched. They're record what we need and come back. Nothing to it."_

Nothing to it...as long as every little detail went their way. And how often had that happened in the last hundred or so vorns?

Frustration breaking, he swept aside metal parts with an arm and pulled the aerial drone file into the clear space. He propped an elbow on either side, hands holding his head up so he could pour over the meager data. Enough sitting around feeling sorry for himself. He would be useful even if his processor melted from the strain and oozed out his audios.

And when Moonracer returned, he'd finally have something to tell her.

...

Moonracer dove into the apartment and slammed the balcony door shut with her foot. "Twin Twist!" she shouted into the comm.

"Youch! These things bite!" came his rough shout in her audio. She heard him swear as he ran, and then the slam of something large and heavy; hopefully a door thick enough the bugs couldn't chew through it.

"Get out there. Fall back to the last check point," Moonracer panted as she ran to the pried open elevator doors and took the fastest way down; the fall down the empty shaft. Static fuzzed around the edges of her vision when her knee was slammed in the landing.

She got a click from Twin Twist and then concentrated on escaping the complex. Even this deep in the building she could hear the buzz of wings circling the structure, could make out the frenzied tick of legs on windows as she ran past broken in doors.

She ignored them all, sticking to the center of the building. The door to the sub-structure had collapsed a long time ago, but there was another way.

"Great,"Moonracer groaned as she slammed open the cover of the square chute and climbed, feet first, inside. "Another garbage chute. Just what I need."

She slid down on a thick coat of slick, slippery muck, refusing to think about what was sticking to her paintjob. She landed with a slight _oof!_ on something soft at the bottom, and tried not to think about what that was either.

It was pitch black down here, the only light coming through the mucked up sides of the chute behind her, and the air was cool and dry against her exterior. The buzz faded to a faraway drone, an unpleasant hum in her teeth.

Cursing colorfully, she clambered out of the landing zone, peeling something that felt like old, brittle rubber off her backside in a long strip.

"Could this day go any more wrong?" she grumbled as she flicked on the twin, half-moon headlights on either side of her helm. Yellow light revealed rough hewn rock walls cut in a straight line, assorted crates stacked on top of each other, making the space even narrower.

"Catacombs," she said to herself. "Even better."

She took off, sidling between the abandoned crates as quickly as she could, sharp corners leaving silver scratches in her paint. There was no light down here except hers. Like most of Tagan Heights, the basement was dug directly into the cliff side, each building's connected by shared underground walkways like this one. They'd preset a rendezvous near Topspin's last position before going in. "And if I manage not to miscount, I'm only ten cycles away."

The buzzing grew stronger when she resurfaced, tentatively poking her head out of an airshaft at surface level. Insecticons were everywhere, dotting every surface available – horizontal, vertical, even the completely upside down.

 _"Wait for it,"_ she told herself. _"Wait for it..."_

KRAK-AA- _BOOM!_

Moonracer smiled to herself beneath the street cover as half of the square she and Twin Twist had just vacated sheared off with the force of the explosion, splitting from the cliff and sliding down, all the way down into the canyon.

 _"I'll give 'em one thing,"_ Moonracer thought as she shot out of the air shaft and tore off down the street away from the distracted Swarm. _"Wreckers sure are reliable when it comes to explosives."_

She transformed as soon as she was out of direct sight and tore up gravel, flinging herself over the lip of the valley hard enough that she flew thirty feet down the side and landed with a crunch that rattled her axels.

Ten feet from the meet-up point, she triggered her transformation, sliding down, small rocks and debris skidding out ahead of her.

A strong arm reached out and snagged her vambrace, swinging her around into the shelter of the middle forge.

Moonracer steadied herself against the rough hewn side of an iron smelter, spark spinning so fast she felt dizzy. When her vision cleared and her systems had calmed their frantic rushing, she turned around to find both Jumpstarters waiting there, some dents and fresh scratches in their plating, but not enough free energon that the insecticons would smell it.

"What happened?" Topspin spat, looking like he wanted to pace but smart enough not to leave the semi-enclosed shadow of the forge. "Which one of you scrapped it up?"

"Oh, typical. Blame everyone when it had to be your fault," Twin Twist snapped back.

"My fault?" Topspin turned and shoved his face in his brother's.

"Had to be," Twin Twist repeated with force. "There's no way it could have seen us. We were too careful!"

"How do you know?" Topspin bumped Twin Twist back a foot. "The thing's got a hundred thousand optics!"

Twin Twist shoved back. "Yeah, well yours are supposed to be better!"

"You metal morons cut it out!" Moonracer ordered them, shoving herself between them and elbowing them apart. She shot them each a hot glare to remind them who was leading this mission anyway. "No one scrapped up. This was an ambush, plain and simple. We were just stupid enough to walk into it."

Topspin revved his engine in derision. "Ambush? They're a bunch of bugs, pearly paint. They're not even smart enough not to eat dead things."

Moonracer scowled at him for the paint comment, but decided now was not the time for a beat down, even if he did deserve it. She pointed out towards Tagan Heights instead, a cloud of rust-colored dust hovering over the destruction. "That's not the same mindless swarm I followed to the Hydrax Plateau. That _thing_ was smart enough to trick us-"

"Trick us?" he repeated in disbelief.

Moonracer felt her optics start to flare. "Did we not just share the same near-death experience?" she demanded. "Those insecticons were tapped into our comm. line! They knew we were there to listen to because they led us right where they wanted us to be. It's not a duplicate; it's a freaking matching _set_."

She fisted her digits and turned away before she hurt one of them. This was insane. Completely insane.

 _"Like I don't have enough things to worry about,"_ she thought, optics wide.

Topspin still wasn't convinced. She caught him mutter something about her having too much glitter in her audios as he shifted angrily.

Only Twin Twist's sudden grip on her shoulder kept her from flying at the Wrecker. She looked over, about ready to rip his hand off at the wrist, but the control in his optics was ice on her temper. At least one of them had the sense to think clearly.

Twin Twist looked at his brother. "They came at us as soon as Moonracer realized they knew we were there. Once the surprise was blown, so were we," he explained as Moonracer shoved her palms against her overheating helm and got a grip on her rage and, yes, plain old fear.

Topspin stared at his brother, like he couldn't believe he had actually sided against him.

Moonracer took advantage of his silence to regain order. "We're getting out of here." She pointed at Twin Twist. "Dump what data we got into Blaster's outpost, then comm. command once we're out of the valley. That should be far enough away it won't pick up our transmission."

Topspin growled, Wrecker pride insulted. "We're _running_?"

Moonracer glared him down. " _Yes_ ," she hissed, stepping forward and prodding him in the chest plates. "That _thing_ didn't just get lucky and catch us off guard. It _laid a trap and we walked right into it_ , which means it's got a brain, maybe even several, and I am not about to let it outsmart me. We are getting out of here while we still can." She looked him up and down. "If you got a problem with that, I can always send up a flare and save the insecticons the effort of finding you themselves."

As if to prove her point, a many-throated scream started in the distance that quickly grew louder as it grew alarmingly closer, until it shook the very air around them.

" _Run_!" Moonracer screamed at them, her voice completely lost in the oncoming rush of needle-like feet.

...

Wheeljack had hoped the insurmountable desire to be back in his lab that lunar cycle was the remains of his inventor's genius raising its head, but standing over the gutted expanse of what was supposed to be the navigational brain of a nova-class starship, he knew he'd been wrong.

The really rankling part however was that all of the weapons and equipment left outside his door the past few orbital cycles for minor fixes had come to him easy as turning his wheels. No guesswork required. No second attempts needed. He knew exactly what needed to be done as soon as he saw the problem. Even the early-generation pretender shell left for him – that he could only assume had been Whirl's last target dummy from the damage done – hadn't taken more than a breem to get functioning again, and it was the most advanced piece of tech to cross his workspace since...well, Wheeljack's last invention.

It was a new experience, not to have all his work blow up in his face before he was done. It was...refreshing. Different. It was...

Awful.

Boring.

Awfully boring.

If this was all that was left to do on Cybertron, death would be more exciting.

"The only thing worse than getting everything wrong is getting it right the first time you try." He huffed a dry laugh. "Who would've hypothesized?"

He refused to let that beat him though. He could push through this. He _would_.

 _"But how...?"_

It was like there was some kind of barrier, a wall, built inside his head, keeping him from his best thoughts. The problem was Shockwave hadn't exactly put in a door...

"Figures," he muttered to himself as he ran a hand along the ridges of his helm. "The one time I could use an explosion and I can't figure out how to light the fuse." He looked up at the ceiling as he thought. "Maybe some nitro-glycerin to get things started...?"

He seriously considered it for a cycle, then shook his head. Nah. The Wreckers were getting bolder around him, memory of his fit fading now that Drivewinder was on his feet again, and that would be asking for more trouble than he felt like handling. He was probably asking for enough just having an open container of energon on the table; a sample of the old ship-grade energon Firestar's team had found underneath the Hydrax Plateau. He was supposed to be testing its stability but, well, he'd gotten distracted staring at the aerial drone file again.

"I'm missing something..." he murmured as he stared at it, tapping a wrench against the table in a steady, _tang_ -ing beat. "I know it's here. I just can't figure out what it is..."

He heard the door open but it took him a moment to drag his optics away from the problem. He forgot it immediately when he saw the bot in his doorway.

"Moonracer!" Her name was startled out of him and he felt his head fins warm in embarrassment. "When did you get back? And-" He looked her up and down, optics creasing in concern as he took in every scratch and dent underneath the filth coating her like her own personal dust cloud. "What happened to you?"

She scowled at him, exhaustion evident in every line as she pushed herself into the room with effort. "Nice to see you too," she groused, favoring her knee far more than she had the last time he'd seen her. "And what do you think happened? It was those fragging insecticons."

Wheeljack stopped next to her, letting her lean on him. "Did someone kick the hive?"

Her expression changed subtly, a kind of hopelessness that chilled him seeping in beneath her exhaustion. She closed her optics and held her head. "Later," she murmured. "I can't talk about it right now so just, ask me later."

A cycle passed in silence, Wheeljack wanting to help her but too afraid of even more bad news to ask.

"Look, um," Moonracer said, standing awkwardly in the middle of the empty floor. "My joint is killing me and Triage has more pressing cases, but something's wrong with my brace so I was wondering if you could patch it for me?"

He hesitated long enough to shutter his optics in surprise, caught off guard by the simple request. "Uh, sure, yeah," he said quickly, setting her on her own balance so he could pull an unused stool out from under his worktable. "Just sit. I'll give it a look."

She nodded her thanks, wincing as she took a step on her own. Wheeljack turned to help her-

Just in time to see her brace slip a gear.

Without the anticipated support of the brace to hold her up, Moonracer stumbled, optics flaring as she fell forward. She reached out, trying to catch herself as he reached for her, but she was too far away.

Not far enough away, however, to miss the wrench half laying on the table.

Her fingers just brushed the edge, but it was enough to send it flying. It spun in slow motion, Wheeljack already knowing in his spark how this would end.

He watched it anyway as it arced almost lazily, and came down on a tower of precariously stacked supply crates holding bits of random junk. They swayed, then tipped forward, the top one upending and tumbling a grease stained capacitor right into the cube of uncertain energon.

Wheeljack stayed on his feet just long enough to see the spray hit the overheated work lamp sitting nearby, and then threw himself to the floor before he could see the chain reaction that followed.

He felt it though – a wash of heat and light on the back of his helm and shoulders that blew away the webs gumming up the works – before he hit the deck half on top of Moonracer.

The explosion was more pop than boom, but it was enough to make his optics fill with snow and leave his audios ringing.

Wheeljack lay there for a moment, a cold thought at the back of his helm telling him _deja vu_...

He quickly focused and refocused his optics, half panicked by the mental image of Shockwave standing over him again. He realized something was vibrating underneath his chest and he pushed himself up on his elbows. He gave his head a shake, but all he heard was an off-chord ringing.

He pushed himself up farther as the ringing resonated into a less piercing sound, which finally resolved into Moonracer's borderline hysteric laughter.

"Talk about a blast from the past," she giggled a little too loudly as her own audios readjusted to normal sound. "Almost like old times, huh Jackie?" She grinned up at him past the dirt and metal dust darkening her faceplates.

Wheeljack blinked down at her, her words triggering a cascade of deeply stored information. "Old times...?" The words trailed out his mouth.

His optics flared in sudden brightness. "Yes!" he cried. "Yes, _exactly_ like old times! Where's all that information on the drones?" he demanded as he tried to get back to his feet. Only Moonracer was still under him and he stepped on her injured knee. She gave a high pitched yelp, jumped high enough to bang her head under the table, and sent a small avalanche of small tools and metal pieces raining down on Wheeljack's head.

He ignored them as he scrambled up, careful of Moonracer sitting on the floor and rubbing the top of her helm. He shoved the remains of the navigational system aside, burning his hand on the smoldering power lines.

"Here they are!" he crowed as she shook out his hand and brought what information they knew of the drones to the front. His bright optics drank in the information greedily. Where was it? He'd seen it a moment ago, before Moonracer had come in...

"Ah-ha!" he cried, pointing with his stinging digit at an almost forgotten side note scrawled in the margins.

Moonracer was only now poking her head above the table, her faceplates still puckered in a pained frown. "What _ah-ha_?" she asked in annoyance. "What was worth stepping on me for?"

He didn't hear her. "Where is it?" he muttered to himself as he pried through the layers of parts and junk coating his table. "Ah!"

He pulled up a holographic image filled with numbers and signs that made Moonracer's processor ache just looking at them. She frowned as a particularly strange one caught her attention. "Haven't I seen that before?"

"Yes," Wheeljack jumped in. "It's what I kept drawing on the floor in Alpha Trion's bay."

Her spark chamber squeezed at the memory as she levered herself onto the empty stool. "Have you figured out what it is yet? Or why Shockwave would want it?"

His head fins glowed so brightly that Moonracer knew he had to be beaming behind his mask. "Weeks ago. Alpha Trion was right; it's a stasis field, a massive one. But that's not the best part. The _best_ part is that no matter how you squeeze it down, it as to at least have a four-part relay _but_ for there to be that many aerial drones, he'd have to have given them two-part processors!"

He waited for Moonracer to start jumping for joy with him, but she only stared at him in confusion. "So he's getting...half off?" she guessed.

He was so giddy he actually found her wrong conclusion endearing. "It means he's double dipping," he told her, taking her hands and giving them a squeeze. "And over tasking a processor that's too simple to fully handle all the programs he's tasked it with."

Moonracer glanced down at their hands, distracted. "Huh?"

Wheeljack didn't notice her flush. "Look. Shockwave's bound up in the same supply demands as we are right? Tools, equipment, fresh energon."

She nodded hesitantly. "Unless he's got a secret passage to Luna-2 and the Lost Colonies, yeah I guess."

"Right." Wheeljack's fins blinked. "So he's multitasking as much as we are. Those aerial drones-" He pointed at the blurry photo on the datapad. "-aren't just there to keep us here. He's also using them to trap the insecticons, keep them from flying the coop."

A sudden image of those starving insecticons unleashed on the galaxy made Moonracer shudder. "Okay..."

"But it's better than that. Because a stasis field large enough to justify _that_ equation-" Moonracer's optics flicked to the holo. "-could easily be generated by a whole atmosphere of drones."

She thought she was starting to understand now. "So the aerial drones are creating a stasis field over the whole planet? That seems like overkill."

He nodded. "But I think he's also using it to guide the insecticons using stasis fields, like- like a maze with movable walls. He's using it to direct them where he wants them to go, keep them away from places he doesn't."

That sounded promising. "Then..." Moonracer's optic ridges furrowed as she thought. "If we can hack into their net, we can guide the insecticons too. Sort of...funnel them away from us?"

His optics flared bright. "Better," he told her. "If I can hook my central processor into the aerial net, I can give them direct _orders_. We could use the Swarm to break through the aerial drones, at least long enough to get our ships through and the drone net would act as a buffer to isolate me from them."

Moonracer felt herself cringe, the mental image of the whole galaxy being eaten returning. "Won't that release the insecticons?"

"I don't think so," Wheeljack assured her. "The drone net is constantly emitting energy, I think because they're creating that massive stasis net. It's so powerful that anything that gets close to it gets their circuits fried."

"Including the insecticons." Moonracer nodded, catching on.

"Right, we can get ourselves out and take out his monsters in one go."

Moonracer didn't know what to say. All she could do was stare at Wheeljack's excited faceplates, looking more and more like the mech that had disappeared.

"Wheeljack..." she finally remembered how to speak. "That's brilliant."

His head fins were blinding. "Of course it is," he told her. "It was your idea."

He turned back to his worktable, babbling in exciting, and missed the faint pink heat that spread across Moonracer's faceplates.


	13. War Council

Hey guys, sorry about dropping off the face of the earth for awhile. I ran out of chapters the same week we had a family emergency, and I didn't feel much like writing for awhile. Then when I did I was all caught up in NaNoWriMo. But it's officially December now, and I promise to start remembering our favorite bots. Hopefully I'll get some Christmas-y chapters written for 'Feels Like Christmas' too, which I haven't updated in what feels like forever.

Thank you all for being so patient! And for loving this story so much that you put up with me. n_n; This chapter is nice and long, so I hope that makes up for the absence some. :)

...

Across Bounding Interstellar Waves

13 – War Council – 13

Wheeljack stood along the wall in the communications suite, Moonracer standing next to him while they watched the activity at the room's center. Her knee had healed a little over the past few orbits, under Triage's stern watch, but she still leaned on him now. Wheeljack didn't mind.

The diffused blue glow of the holo-emitter began like an infant star in the middle of the recessed floor and a larger-than-life image of Elita-One's head and shoulders sprung into life, her butterfly-shaped helm looking like some kind of strange art display where it sat between Alpha Trion's distracted visage and Chromia's focused one.

"Ultra Magnus," Elita-One gave a shortened greeting, faceplates tight with apprehension. "I've read Moonracer's report. Are you positive this one is intelligent?"

Ultra Magus's hard face became harder. He nodded. "Unfortunately, yes. Blaster hacked into one of the old weather satellites for surveillance. Once it lost track of Moonracer's team, it conducted a grid pattern search of Tagan Heights."

Her optic ridges rose infinitesimally.

"It tried to disguise its movements as random searching, but the pattern is there," Magnus affirmed. And with the Commander's way with patterns, no one disbelieved him. "I don't know why Shockwave held this one back, but from what we've seen it's as intelligent as its counterpart is savage."

"Well then it's a good thing we're leaving," Elita-One said, her words more sorrow than relief. She stiffened her spinal strut. "Have you tested the energon Firestar and the others found?"

Ultra Magnus flicked his optics to Wheeljack rather than answer. Clearing his vocorder of his nervous fuzz, Wheeljack shrugged the dozing Moonracer upright before quickly stepping down into the communications circle. "Yes. It's standard apex ship fuel. Perfectly stable. No taint of dark energon."

"Stale?"

"No. Measures were taken to keep it fresh."

Elita raised an optic ridge at him. "Meaning?"

"Someone added a carrax-thiomede solution to it." And then at the continued blank looks added, "It's a chemical preservative used to keep fuel stable longer."

"That in itself is not unusual," Alpha Trion told them. "It's a common chemical and a practical intent."

"Ask him why he has that look on his face," Moonracer spoke up from the back, her words slow with the weight of oncoming recharge.

Wheeljack half turned around. "I don't have a look," he lied. The look was the main reason he wore the mask.

Even Moonracer's smile was tired. "You totally have a look. The 'I-don't-know-what-this-means-and-I-don't-want-to-mention-it-until-I-do' look."

"Wheeljack," Elita-One put in firmly, making him turn back to the camera, "is this true?"

"Uh..." Wheeljack hesitated. Dent Moonracer's perceptiveness. This was the part he hadn't quite figured out yet. "Well, I ran a comparison between the sample and recorded energon collections and I didn't find any of the usual markers to signify where it was mined. More tests confirmed that it wasn't mined at all, but farmed. Probably from the Sigmax Plains if the nutrient veins are anything to go by." Energon farming wasn't as quick or convenient as mining the aged crystals straight out of the ground and it had fallen out of heavy production generations ago, but it had its perks – being more resilient to the dark energon plague was one.

Unfortunately it ate up time and nutrients like, well, insecticons, and was far from practical in their current circumstances.

Optic ridges creased together. "So it was farmed, so what?" Chromia asked. "It was probably forgotten by whoever spiked it and left it there."

"That's what I thought," Wheeljack conceded with half a nod. "Until Moonracer mentioned the lack of dust."

Chromia leveled an uncaring stare at him. "Dust?"

"I was the dirtiest thing in there," Moonracer called from the back. "I left grease smudges all over a cube when I picked it up to get a better look."

"So you're complaining...because they're clean?"

"He means they were moved there recently," Elita clarified for her sister. "Too recently to have been forgotten under Hydrax when they were still building ships that would need that kind of fuel."

Wheeljack nodded as Chromia stopped to process this. Her frown deepened for a cycle, the lines between her optic ridges etching deeper, and then she shook them off. "Still, so what? Old, new, it's there, it's usable, and we need it. Who cares where it came from?"

" _I_ do," both commanders said. Their optics met in slight surprise, and then Elita-One inclined her head for Ultra Magnus to proceed first. "If it was left there for us to find, we need to know by who and for what purpose."

"And if this is another of Shockwave's traps, it will have disastrous results," Elita-One added. "If it was left by a friend, we will need to make sure they are not left here when we evacuate."

A sound like steel-wool scraping away rust got their attention – Alpha Trion clearing his aging vocorder. "That will not be necessary," he told them with only the slightest hint of uneasiness.

All optics turned to him, but he wasn't volunteering anything further. Wheeljack's optics flicked around the different faceplates, mostly seeing the same reluctance to press the old mech. Even Ultra Magnus was holding back out of a long-ingrained deference.

Fortunately for them, Elita-One knew Alpha Trion too well to defer lightly. "We'll need more than that Alpha Trion," she addressed him respectfully, but firmly. "Especially if somebot is still hiding out there. I will not leave anyone else to Shockwave's tender mercies and I am disappointed that you think I would."

Alpha Trion actually winced. "No, no, Elita. I wouldn't dare think such. However...well, I have no proof of anything at this time."

He left off again, leaving them to watch the image of the old mech expectantly. "We're all audios, Archivist," Ultra Magnus prompted, encouraged by Elita-One's example.

"Well..." Alpha Trion actually sounded bashful. "I can't imagine why she's still farming flight-class energon, however..." They could practically see him sidling around the point. "I _do_ know someone with her own energon plot that could have provided us this...bounty."

They stared at him. " _Bounty_?" Firestar's voice sounded tiny from where it came from somewhere behind Chromia and Elita. "There was enough there to feed the whole of Old Iacon during the Groundbound Games!"

Behind him, Wheeljack heard Moonracer give an exhausted giggle. "Last time they came to Iacon, I was yellow and green for an orn," she told him.

Wheeljack smiled at the mental image that provided, but the others were too focused on the old mech to pay her any attention.

"Well, I can't say I'm surprised exactly that she has such a surplus. She has been farming energon for a long time now. Old habits and all-" Alpha Trion began to ramble, long digits fussing with his wiry beard nervously.

" _Who_ , Alpha Trion?" Elita snapped.

He stopped and blinked at her. "Beta of course." He cocked his head slightly, white wires of his beard swinging. "Didn't I say?"

" _Beta_?" Chromia gawked before they could tell him that he hadn't. "Former Prima Beta just had this energon lying around? She would have had to start farming this when Sentinel Prime was in diapers!"

"Oh, long before that," Alpha Trion said sagely, completely missing her sarcasm. He was looking up at the ceiling in thought now, still combing his digits through his beard. "She was a farm-femme from the beginning, however she began this plot in earnest during the Quintesson occupation. She's always been the cautious sort, and she's had a long time to perfect her security measures." He huffed a creaky laugh. "I'd wouldn't be surprised if she hasn't even noticed the Dark Energon, she's so isolated down there. Just her and her records. She does love to record things..."

He trailed off wistfully, a smile on his faceplates Wheeljack could only call besotted. He hoped he didn't look near that ridiculous when he talked to Moonracer.

"Beta doesn't know the planet's been poisoned?" Elita-One exclaimed, optics glowing brighter in concern. She met Ultra Magnus' optics and saw his similar train of thought. "She must be told. Given new information, she may need some of her gift back. Chromia, I want you and Greenlight to go down there in person to ensure Beta's safety."

"Leadfoot and Roadbuster are familiar with that area as well," Ultra Magnus spoke up, hands clasped behind his broad back. "I'll have them meet you where the old racetrack used to be."

Alpha Trion cut them both off with a disarming wave of his hand before Wheeljack could finish his calculations of how far their ships would get if Elita-One was serious about returning the energon. Even the early calculations weren't pretty...

"That is enough from both of you!" the old mech told them in a voice that would not stand for any disobedience. Wheeljack immediately felt like he'd been caught playing with the innards of his first recharge bunk by his guardian. He looked back, lifting his optic ridges at Moonracer, who returned his surprise. _Who knew the goofy old mech had it in him?_

Alpha Trion's optics were too busy switching between both commanders to notice their reappraisal. "You will not be returning anything," he told them. "For one, because Beta _will_ take it back. And for two, because she would not offer it if she could not live without it. I have no doubt that she has a small mountain of supplies buried in that underground network of hers, more than enough to see her through the coming drought. Now we will stop discussing issues that are already resolved and return to our unfinished business." His sharp optics found Wheeljack still standing awkwardly at the edge of the communications ring, and the younger mech jerked to nervous attention. "Now I believe you have a proposal for how to handle the aerial net currently cutting off your escape."

"Uh..." Wheeljack had to quickly remember what it was the Archivist was talking about, although it was difficult with the way Chromia watched him expectantly and Elita-One narrowing her optics at him. "Yes," he stammered before it slammed into place, "yes. The aerial drones." He looked down and tapped a sequence into the control panel set in his vambrace. Data began to scroll across the display screen, mirrored on the femmes' monitors halfway around the planet.

"New information has come to light concerning the aerial net. Shockwave isn't using it just to keep us on Cybertron, but to contain his Swarm. Using a powerful stasis field, he shepherds it where he wants it to go, mostly to locations where we've been recently spotted."

"Why the indirect route?" Chromia asked. "Why not order it to our last seen locations directly?"

"Because the Swarm has all the processing power of a spark-eater," Wheeljack reminded her. "It's driven by hunger more than any kind of higher reasoning."

"And this new Swarm?" Alpha Trion asked. "Does he guide it the same way?"

Wheeljack frowned. "I can't say for certain, but I don't think so. Monitoring the drone net's stasis field revealed far less activity concerning the second Swarm. Personally I think that attests to Ultra Magnus' theory that it's intelligent – a Hive more than a Swarm. But for my purposes, that makes little difference."

"Why?" Elita asked.

Wheeljack met her optics. "Because if they crash into the atmospheric stasis net the drones create, they'll still fry."

Chromia stared at him. " _That's_ your big plan? Fling the bugs at the stasis field?"

"Not fling; _order_ ," Wheeljack corrected her. He looked away, found Moonracer's optics watching him from the side. She gave him a small nod of encouragement. _I'm right here._

Cycling coolant faster now, Wheeljack turned back. "You've undoubtedly heard about my confrontation with the Hive at Altihex."

"One of the little guys handed you a plate-cutter like a trained circuit hound." Chromia smirked at the idea.

Wheeljack gave a curt nod. "I compelled him against his will. For whatever reason-" His spark spun fast enough he felt dizzy, his cooling systems ramping up to deal with the excess heat. "For whatever reason, Shockwave made the insecticons my symbiotes." There was no better word for it.

Every little piece of them stopped moving, just for a nano-klik. Elita-One recovered first. "Your _symbiotes_?"

"But there's got to be more than a thousand of them!" Chromia exclaimed. And then she gave him a sideways look he couldn't make himself meet. "No wonder you were so nuts and bolts..."

She said it low, but he heard her anyway. He wished he could be as certain as her that all those insecticon minds _were_ the reason his mind was so scattered. That it wasn't all on his own head, so to speak.

He forgot what he should be saying again. He stood there, frowning, trying to remember what came next.

"The good news-" Ultra Magnus stepped forward, remembering for him, "-is that with Wheeljack being the dominant bond, the insecticons have no choice but to obey his commands."

Yes, that was it. "I would need a lot of power to compel them all at once," Wheeljack continued. "Fortunately for us there's a great big powerhouse hovering in our upper atmosphere. If I can get up there and hook myself into the aerial drones' command structure, I can command the insecticons to attack the net. The resulting charge should bring it down, at least long enough for our ships to get through."

Ultra Magnus nodded, then took over. At his signal, Blaster called up a holographic image of Shockwave's headquarters. "Shockwave controls the aerial net from here." The commander indicated a glowing circle set near the top of the building. "While Shockwave and his experiments are distracted, a small team will take Wheeljack inside so he can hack into the net and give the order. Once the insecticons are locked in, we'll follow in the _Starlight_ and _Steelhaven_. Any questions?"

Standing outside the communications ring, Rewind raised an uncertain hand. Like always, the pen camera attached to the side of his head glowed a steady red as it recorded. Ultra Magnus gave him a sharp nod. "Just for the sake of posterity, what then?" the small mech asked.

The commander's optics narrowed. "Explain."

"Well..." Rewind couldn't think of a simpler way to explain it, so he had to draw it out. "I get the major points – get Wheeljack inside, get out, don't get eaten – but what happens after?"

A rectangular optic ridge dented upward. "After?"

"Yeah, _after_. Here. Fill in the blank, all right? _After they leave Cybertron, the Autobots will_ _." He held his hands a space apart, leaving room for the missing ending.

The optic ridge un-dented, but Ultra Magnus didn't speak. He stared the small mech down so long that Wheeljack could see the ellipses forming in a bubble near his head-mounted recorder. Finally the big mech pursed his lips and looked over at Elita-One.

"Of course our long term goal is to regroup with Optimus Prime and the bulk of our Autobot forces. However given we have no idea where they are and only shaky methods of finding them..." Again he met Elita's optics to find the femme daring him to comment on the "shakiness" of her sparkbond with Optimus. "We could be searching for a long time. Add to that that we do not know where Megatron and his Decepticons are as well..." He looked back at Rewind with a scowl that had the little mech's vocorder grinding. "We do not know what will happen _after_."

Uncertain murmurs swept around the room. Even Wheeljack's spark constricted and he looked for Moonracer's familiar optics. They were bright with concern and she was looking for him too.

Relief mixed with a bubbling kind of fear that made his circuits frizz. Even if the Wreckers and the femmes stayed together, and it didn't feel logical that they would, what was out there for them? Besides empty space and foreign stars, what kind of life could they expect?

"We survive." Elita's voice cut through the burgeoning hopelessness in the room. "Optimus and the others are searching for the AllSpark, and so must we. I have no doubt that we will find it and one day Cybertron will be home again, but until then we keep going. We save who we can, whenever we can, wherever we are. As Autobots."

"Till All Are One," they murmured in chorus. The words left a strange vibration in Wheeljack's vocorder. It was the first time he'd spoken them since his escape.

Rewind looked around the room, taking in the solemnity. He made sure Elita and Magnus weren't looking before quickly checking his recorder, the mumbled words, "Please tell me I didn't miss that," only just reaching Wheeljack's audios.

"Wheeljack." Wheeljack jumped at the femme commander's careful voice. He jerked around to find her watching him. "Was there anything else you needed to add?"

Wheeljack thought, looked over at Moonracer and accepted her small shake of her head. "No, Commander," he answered.

Elita-One nodded. "Very well. Ultra Magnus, I'll meet you at the launch site as we arranged. Elita-One out."

With a look to her own communication's bot off screen, her image winked out, Chromia's following shortly. Alpha Trion however, stayed where he was.

Ultra Magnus frowned when he saw the old mech's visage still hovering in his communications ring. "Was there something else, Archivist?"

Wheeljack turned at the question, and felt a shiver that went all the way down to his spinal strut. Alpha Trion was watching him, a small frown etched into his worn faceplates.

"Hmm? Oh no. Or yes. Maybe?"

"Archivist," Ultra Magnus stated flatly, tired of the strange old mech and his nonsense.

Alpha Trion ignored him and smiled at Wheeljack. The gesture didn't make the shivers go away. "I was just thinking," the old mech went on a little clearer, "that Shockwave undoubtedly has a veritable army of viruses and firewalls protecting his aerial drones."

Wheeljack slowly nodded. "Very likely. The firewalls I'm prepared for, however without knowing what viruses he's downloaded exactly there isn't much I can do to defend against them. General anti-virals won't be specific enough to stop all of them and the more powerful ones will require actual counter-codes that will only cover one, maybe two, viruses out of the army." He shrugged. "I'll do what I can to keep them out of my processor but I think it's going to come down to you guys prying them out of my head once I'm disconnected."

He saw Moonracer stiffen in the corner of his vision. _I know, like I don't have enough head trauma already._

Alpha Trion nodded sagely, the wires of his beard swaying. "Yes, yes. That's why I was thinking. I have a new program I've been training up who could be very useful to you. However..." he trailed off, optics sliding sideways as he did. "She is not quite...available at the moment. I'm not sure she'll be ready in time."

Wheeljack stared at him. _What's the point in telling me now then?_

"Okay..." he said slowly. "Well if you do get her operational in time, let me know, I guess and I'll download...it." Coding was all numbers, he reminded himself. _Of course,_ _I'll have to stop time to get it and everything else done in time, but hey, what's one more thing to do, right?_

"Excellent!" Alpha Trion cried, his oversized image beaming at the engineer. He shot a semi-nervous glance at something on his end and then quickly said, "I must be going." Then he winked out of existence. Wheeljack hung his head and vented a sigh as the room lights brightened to their usual level.

Moonracer limped up behind him and leaned her arm on his shoulder. "Taking another femme into battle? If you're trying to make me jealous, it would work better if 'she' wasn't programmed in a lab."

Wheeljack couldn't think of anything clever to say, and revved a noncommittal grunt. So much was happening, he felt it like a weight in his helm. Ultra Magnus wanted to move on the tower as soon as the two ships were given the green light. Nautica would run her final checks as soon as Alpha Trion gave her a green light of her own and let her out of medbay. Two, maybe three orbits, he guessed. That wasn't much time to prepare himself to hack the net, and now he needed to add time to _maybe_ download Alpha Trion's new antivirus 'friend'...

He reached up and scrubbed a palm over the ridges of his helm, turning to the slight femme next to him. "You want to get some energon?"

She cocked her head in thought before saying, "I could refuel."

...

Alpha Trion slipped out of command while Elita-One was distracted by a report from Lancer. She'd wanted to ask him about a comment he'd made, but after hearing him explain his new antivirus to Wheeljack, decided now was as good a time as any for a long spark-to-spark.

The old mech, however, didn't agree with her if his quick exit was anything to go by.

Elita-One burst out of the door to the communications suite just in time to see her mentor turn the far corner. She took off after him. "Alpha Trion!" she called, hoping he would stop, but not sure that he would. He'd been unusually busy these past few orbital cycles – between the still recovering Nautica, the preparations for the evacuation, and whatever projects of his own he hadn't bothered to tell her about – but she didn't think that's all this was. He was avoiding her. Why she hadn't yet figured out.

She caught up with him along a deserted corridor well away from the communications suite. And he was definitely scurrying away from her as fast as his old limbs would take him.

When he couldn't run fast enough, he turned and smiled a little too widely at her. "Why, Elita! How pleasant. I feel as though I haven't seen you in ages."

Her mouth thinned as she eyed him. "The feeling is mutual, Alpha Trion. I couldn't help but notice you left terribly fast back there," she started gently. "Is your conscious burdened, Father?"

Alpha Trion's faceplates didn't shift, but she felt a roil of emotions roll off him like a physical force, and she resisted the urge to step away from the wiry old mech. Their relationship had altered after he'd gifted her second life as Elita-One, become more like that of a mech creator and grown youngling, and he'd always had a profound reaction to her calling him 'Father'. She'd assumed it was because he felt the same familial love for her as she did for him, but there were times like this where he looked more like she squeezed an open wound.

She brushed aside her disappointment and focused on the unanswered questions filling her processor. "I couldn't help but notice that when you spoke to Wheeljack you said 'your escape'. As in 'your escape and not mine'?" She raised her optic ridges at him. "Tell me it was only a slip of the tongue, Father. Tell me you aren't planning on doing something foolish."

Alpha Trion did not respond. Instead a grim smile swept up one side of his mouth as he watched her with keen optics.

"Ah," he mumbled a sigh as he shook his head. "You always were highly perceptive, Elita-One. I'm surprised I didn't give myself away much earlier."

Dread slipped down her spinal strut. She must have misunderstood. They needed him out there, as a light, a guide. He was one of the few left that had real experience with foreign organic species. Without him, they would have to learn everything new.

"You're not coming with us." The words numbed her vocorder.

He inclined his head to the truth. "Yes. I will be staying here on Cybertron. Someone must remain with the Core, and it is long past my turn."

She didn't know what that meant, could barely focus her processor on his words. "But...we need you with us! Out there!"

He tilted his head at her. "Oh? What for?"

 _What for?_ "Everything!" she cried, losing her control like she hadn't done in orns. "You're the Archivist! Everything in the Hall of Records is stashed away somewhere in that processor of yours and we're going to need it to deal with the ships and the organics and- and-" She couldn't think of a third quick enough. Her vents were loud in the hallway, her cooling fans whirring like cyclones as she tried readjust her system.

With a small, somewhat sad smile, Alpha Trion laid a hand on her shoulder guard. "You give yourself too little credit, Elita. I have given you everything you need to survive the exodus. Now I have to do the same for Cybertron. Besides-" He huffed under his beard, "-as Beta is so fond of pointing out, she did it last time."

Elita-One pressed the heels of her palms into her optics, wishing that could dispel the drumbeat ache building in her optic circuits. She hadn't thought she'd need to do this without Alpha Trion there to guide her. _Alone_ , her spark kept thrumming, _they're all leaving me to go this alone..._

She reached with unseen digits for her sparkbond with Optimus, but stopped herself before she could find the dim spot where it had been before the Exodus. They had both agreed it was smarter to put it aside until they were together again, to keep from always reaching across the universe that Elita felt now stood between them and spreading their sparks too thin. She knew it would be hard, but she hadn't counted on the fact that she would _want_ to reach so often. She kept catching herself searching for his familiar presence linked to hers, expecting him to be there because he had been for such a long time.

The femme gave herself a shake. This wasn't helping. And talk of Beta had reminded her of the other point she wished to understand. Alpha Trion kept calling his new program a 'she'. Why? "This secret program of yours, it's not just an antivirus, is it?"

He hemmed, optics rolling to stare at the high corner of the ceiling. "She...may have a more...three-dimensional function," he admitted.

Elita-One's mouth thinned and she crossed her arms over her chestplates. "It's an AI." She didn't beat around the bush.

Still he didn't come out and say it. "That's...closer to the truth."

"An AI that perhaps escaped its original computing processor?" she pressed, chasing a hunch.

"Not...precisely," Alpha Trion hedged.

Elita shifted her weight, holding his gaze. "And what does that mean?"

He blinked at her. "It means she didn't escape so much as I...released her."

Elita's spark sputtered. "You released an untested AI?" she hissed, keeping her voice down. She cast a look around, but they were quite alone. "Do you know what kind of damage that could do to us? To Cybertron?" If it got down to the Core, still plagued with dark energon and in no shape to fight off a wayward AI, there was no telling how long it would set Cybertron back.

He waved a hand, dismissing her fears. "Oh, don't be ridiculous, Elita-One. She won't hurt Cybertron. She's here to protect it. Vector Sigma vetted her himself. He was awfully taken with her, which I found quite surprising since he's never taken to anyone ever-"

Stray pieces clicked in Elita's cranium. "The data ghost," she breathed, optics widening slightly. "The data ghost Firestar saw under Hydrax Spaceport was your escaped AI!"

" _Released_ ," he stressed. "And yes, she deviated from her assigned vector when the Swarm cornered Firestar's team." He looked away with a sheepish tug at his beard. "Unfortunately that's the last time I heard from her. I'm afraid she never returned to her original objective."

Elita scowled harder at him, arms crossed over her chestplates. " _Escaped_ ," she repeated. "And off doing only Primus knows what when we need _every_ gear in place for this to work." She pointed a stern digit at him. "Find. Her. Alpha Trion. We don't dare leave a wild card as unpredictable as an engineered personality running around free."

She turned on her heel, too outraged to continue the conversation. If he had anymore secrets that pertained to her, he could keep them to himself for the time being.

Alpha Trion watched her go. He slowly shuttered and unshuttered his optics, his glowing irises making micro ticking noises in the now silent hall. "Whoever said she was engineered? I didn't." He blinked again. "Did I?"


	14. The Shipyard

My readers are saints. There's just no other way to explain your patience as I rewrote this chapter at least three different times before I finally realized how it needed to go. And even though it's been ages since I posted anything and even more since I updated this story, there hasn't been a day someone hasn't read something of mine, so I just wanted to tell you all how grateful I am that you are all so amazing!

Now I just have to remember what I wanted to happen after this... o.o

* * *

Across Bounding Interstellar Waves

14 – The Shipyard – 14

Saving the femmebots from that slobbering buzzer-beast had been so much more fun then what the Old Programmer had told her to do, so she figured she would keep on doing it. It was a full time job too, seeing as how Pit-bent they were on killing themselves, so she'd been left with no choice – absolutely none! – but to ignore her programmer's directives and run away from her home computer entirely.

Besides, she wanted to see what else she could do that was fun.

Lots it turned out. She could run down wires like they were roads, could tamper with circuits and switches whenever she felt like it, and no one ever had to know it was her! She even accidentally triggered the air cooling unit after tripping over its code, leaving the sublevels of the Old Programmer's laboratory stuck in arctic temperatures. She'd escaped the base entirely while he was trying to fix it.

It'd taken her a few revolutions of the planet to find the shipyard where the bots were _fussing_ over things. But it was so full of odds and ends for her to explore – labyrinths held in broken motherboards, exposed connections she could use to jump between machines, and severed pathways she could spend hours getting lost in – that she got a little distracted from her Objective. But today she would focus!

Oh, look! Guests!

"He released a _what_?"

And they were talking about her! How flattering.

She skipped over, running through rust-cluttered technology that had been abandoned in the Scrap Fields until she was slipping past the protective plating of something un-broken and spiraling up the circuits of what proved to be a very fancy hammer. _Magnus Hammer,_ her coding picked up the identification tag as she settled in to eavesdrop properly. C _an it be eavesdropping if they're talking about me?_ she idly wondered before tuning in to the conversation.

...

"Keep your volume level, Ultra Magnus, this is not information that needs to be shared at this point," Elita-One murmured, something like a warning ghosting down her spinal strut. She looked around but didn't see anyone standing close enough to listen in on their conversation, but her extra sense continued to hum a hazy warning that they were not alone.

"But an untested AI personality?" Ultra Magnus hissed in his reverberating voice. "Why would he just _let it out_?"

Elita kept one optic out as she nodded grimly, glad _someone_ other than herself saw how outrageous this was. "He did not say, although he clearly expected her to return afterwards."

Ultra Magnus, optics burning fiercely out of stern faceplates, turned back to the miles of garbage, broken bits, and all around junk that had been tossed in the Elysium Scrap Fields before the war broke out. Elita-One spared a glance as well, taking in the valley of half rusted machinery falling down below them only to rise on the other side, leaving a wide valley to hide their ships in. _Hasn't changed much_ , she thought. _But then it wouldn't, would it? Who'd want to spend all their time slogging through this useless scrap?_

"Hey look! A vintage warp core! It's practically new!"

Elita's optics slid to the bots surrounding Wheeljack. The knot of engineers stared at the hunkajunk reverentially, afraid to even touch it. Moonracer, shunted to the edge of the cluster, caught Elita's optics, rolled her own, and shook her head.

The femme commander gave a small smile. _At least I'm not the only one bored out here. But as far as hiding in plain sight goes, this has worked out far better than I anticipated._

Ultra Magnus hadn't noticed her introspection. "I can't believe he would be so foolish..." he grumbled as he surveyed the hills for any signs of the Swarm. Their respective ships were perched below them, hidden from above by overhanging scrap metal. The _Starlight_ was nearly invisible where she sat, her silver skin reflecting the surroundings like a mirror, but the _Steelhaven_ – a Galatica-class battle cruiser that had been left here as a shell of its former self and far bigger to boot – stuck out beyond the edge, like a cyber-cat that had grown too big for its cave.

The big mech turned to her suddenly. "I know you are fond of the old mech, Elita-One, but perhaps it's better that he has decided to stay here. I am concerned he would cause...additional trouble in his semi-addled state if he accompanies us."

Elita-One flared her optics at him. "And you leave him here to starve for it?" she demanded.

Ultra Magnus had the gut-wiring to bark a laugh. "Like something as simple as energon deprivation could extinguish him. I have no doubt he'll do _exactly_ what he says he'll do and somehow find a way inside Vector Sigma to wait for our return." His optics narrowed and he grumbled not quite loud enough she was meant to hear, "Probably by yakking at him until he lets him in just to mute him."

Elita felt herself smile at the edges of her mouth. She wondered if Ultra Magnus realized he believed in one of the most persistent pre-war rumors that Alpha Trion, in his tenure as Archivist of Cybertron, had discovered the secrets of the Thirteen hidden away in the Hall of Records, including the location of Cybertron's central processor, Vector Sigma.

"I still do not like the idea of leaving him, or _anybot_ , here Magnus. Even ones as well prepared as Beta appears to be," Elita told him, her optics sliding to the energon stockpiles they'd transported here for the _Starlight_ and _Steelhaven_. Bots carefully sorted the stock according to ship consumption and crew size. "I can't help but think he should have left with Optimus, since he understands Alpha Trion so much better, but we needed him here."

She trailed off, half consciously reaching for her shuttered sparkbond with Optimus, but stopped herself before she could open the floodgates. Memories still rose up, trying to swamp her – the hum of his spark, the depth of his voice, how he would still sort data alphabetically if he was stuck on some inner problem, even though he was no longer a data clerk – numerous of those little things no one else was in a position to really notice. She held them close for a klik, then locked them back down deep in her memory core where they would not get in the way of their immediate survival.

A small, persistent motion eventually jutted into her awareness and she looked up, only to see Ultra Magnus shifting uneasily between his stabilizing servos. Elita stared, briefly not believing her own optics, but no. The Wrecker Commander was _fidgeting_.

"Ultra Magnus?" she prompted, for a moment thinking he just felt uneasy about her retrospective, but the look he shot her was too uncomfortable just to be on her account, she thought.

Elita-One stepped closer so there was zero chance of them being overheard, although her warning sense continued to hum annoyingly in the back of her helm. "What is it?"

He looked at her and she leaned back. Her premonition mixed with shock at the fact that Ultra Magnus looked _uncertain_ , making electricity snap down her limbs. She'd never seen him doubt himself as long as she'd known him. It was as unnerving as Alpha Trion telling her they'd have to leave without him.

Ultra Magnus stared at her, his optics unmoving. He obviously didn't _want_ to tell her, but perhaps still thought she should know...?

"Magnus," she said more firmly, voice going even lower. "Tell me."

He looked back at the ships sitting in the valley of antique scrap. The knot of engineers had broken up, returning to their tasks. Sparks showered down to the ground to smolder as a squat mech welded the base of a turret to the underside of _Steelhaven_.

"It has nothing to do with our current circumstances," Ultra Magnus finally said in what she thought was meant to be reassurance. He fidgeted some more, his digits flexing on the handle of his war hammer as he looked down. "It is more...personal information."

"Personal?" Elita-One repeated in surprise. He'd never discussed anything _personal_ with her, even after she had bonded with his brother. Sometimes she even forgot herself that she and Magnus were, technically, related themselves.

 _Not so difficult since he's probably never spoken of his relation to Optimus in his lifecycle,_ Elita thought as she frowned at him. _He's more a commander-in-law than a brother-in-law._ She tried not to rev a laugh, afraid it would put him off explaining.

Ultra Magnus grumbled something abrasive under his vents and scrubbed a hand across his mouth. "I am probably making a bigger deal out of it then it is. I was very young after all, prone to more flights of fancy than I am now-"

The urge to laugh doubled, and Elita had to hide it by making her engine cough. Stray sparks shot off the Magnus Hammer and they both twitched for their weapons before realizing what it was. Somewhere in the back of her mind though, Elita would have sworn she heard a femme laughing.

Ultra Magnus shook out his hand as he went on. "But the memory is set on a loop and I can't get it out of my central processor." He looked her up and down as if inspecting her, his faceplates returning to their usual grim arrangement. "Maybe you'll know better what to make of it."

Elita-One raised her optic ridges at him and waited.

He didn't remove his hand from his chin, but pressed a digit over his mouth as he thought. Finally he lowered it and said rather slowly, "Optimus, or I suppose I should say Orion Pax, didn't come out of the Well of AllSparks."

She frowned at him. "I don't understand."

The Wrecker Commander exhaled roughly and shuffled on his feet again. "Alpha Trion brought him to my guardian when he was a sparkling. I was barely more than a new spark myself, so the memory is corroded, but I remember he was already in his sparkling frame." His optic ridges formed a thick line over his optics. "He was filthy. Dirt ground into his joints and grease smeared across his face." He wiped a hand over his cheek under one optic without realizing, to show where. He stared out across the dips and swells of junk but didn't see them as he tried to pinpoint details in the early memory file.

"I remember it was late in the lunar cycle, and the adults talked for a very long time. Magnum, my guardian, kept pacing. I can never remember if he was afraid or furious, but it terrified the oil out of me. All I can remember him saying is, 'Of course I'll take him, but if you leave him now, he'll know and come kill him anyway.'"

"Kill him?" Elita's optics sparked brighter. "You mean, kill Orion? Who would want to?"

Magnus tilted his head, self-reproof appearing on his stern faceplates. "Yes. And I was too scared to find out. After that I ran and hid under my recharge berth," he murmured, sounding thoroughly disappointed in his youngling-self for acting his age. "When I came out again, Trion and the sparkling were gone. Magnum never said anything about them. Not even when he came home vorns later with the same sparkling, only cleaner, and told me Orion Pax was my new brother."

" _Vorns_ later?" Elita repeated. "It couldn't have been the same sparkling. That's not possible."

Magnus stared her down. "It was."

Her ridges furrowed. Ultra Magnus' certainty was hard to fight. "But how? I mean, yes there are stasis tubes and medical cryostasis chambers, but to put a sparkling in either one..." She shook her head. "More likely it would kill him."

Magnus was silent a moment before reminding her, "If someone really was searching for him, it was probably the safer option."

Elita was still shaking her head. "When was this?" she asked a moment later.

Blue optics narrowed as the mech lined up his own life with overall history. "The Croniv Plague had broken out a short time before. I didn't want to get too close to the sparkling because I thought he had it." He held up a hand and made a face. "He was so dirty."

Elita-One felt her optics flare brightly. The Croniv Plague had appeared overnight before the appearance of Prima, killing more bots than any war they'd taken part in, until now. Sentinel Prime had always believed Cybertron had been exposed to the plague by organic trading partners, and it had fed his isolationist paranoia. But something Optimus had told her once stuck in her memory. How some historians believed the plague was actually a consequence of the Purge – a reference to the Fallen's return and slaughter of the offspring of his brothers. "Of course," he'd added, "if that's true then the Council conveniently left that out of the official records in an effort to rewrite history."

It was well before her time, of course. She would have thought well before Ultra Magnus' as well. But to remember all this he must only be a generation younger than Ratchet.

She gave Ultra Magnus a speculative look and a small smile. "You've aged well, Magnus."

He huffed a dry chuckle. "Looking to trade brothers?" he muttered.

She laughed without intending to. She'd never heard him make a joke before, at least not on purpose. His shoulder guards dropped an inch as some tension left his spinal strut. She realized he hadn't been certain of her reaction.

Honestly Elita wasn't sure she _had_ reacted yet. Too much was changing in too little time, her personal universe being thoroughly and methodically chipped away into some new state. She hadn't had the chance to assimilate it all yet, much less discover what it all meant.

Elita looked down at the pink paint of her palm, then out at the piles of scrap metal that blended in with the rest of her ravaged planet. With Optimus already on her mind, the urge to reach for him grew stronger than before. She had to shutter her optics and make herself still to keep from unshuttering the sparkbond centered in her chassis.

"So what does this mean?" she asked a cycle later, her fingers curled into her palm. "That Optimus is older than he thinks? That someone out there is still after his head?" She shrugged. "It's not like that's new information at this point." Her optics narrowed as a memory struck her. "Could it have anything to do with why Alpha Trion pushed the Council to name Optimus as the next Prime?"

"I don't know," Ultra Magnus murmured. "I just- I thought with Alpha Trion keeping secrets, you should know he's keeping one more, but I don't pretend to know what it means."

 _Well, at least that's one mystery solved,_ Elita thought as Magnus fell silent and she looked down at the shipyard to try and find an answer to the mystery her sparkmate was quickly becoming. _Magnus is too straightforward for secrets, or for any bot that keeps them out of habit._

Her optics narrowed further. And with Alpha Trion refusing to leave, she had less than an orn to weasel the answers out of the old mech.

She huffed through her vents. _After our last conversation I have about as much chance of that happening as Shockwave turning off the net and waving us through with a smile._

Distracted as she was by her own thoughts, she didn't notice her hazy warning sense had disappeared in time to a string of sparks trailing down the side of the valley.

...

It was hotter down in the valley below, the wind stifled by the mountainous hills of abandoned junk the sentries were posted on. Even in the thick shade of the _Starlight's_ underbelly the air was stifling, and Nautica swept a hand under her helm. Her cooling systems still hadn't recovered from her brush with dark energon and she felt on the verge of overheating.

The sting of sparks against her light armor kept her from stepping away from the heated bulk of the ship. _Focus, focus, focus..._ She vented a hot sigh. _A girl genius's work is never done._

She stepped back up on the hulk of a rusted out compressor housing to put her head and shoulders inside the square hatchway revealing the inner workings of the ship. Something was still sparking inside, but she couldn't pinpoint the source...

"Where's it coming from?" she grumbled as she tried to track the current leaping around the tight space, sprays of electricity momentarily blinding her when they impacted on her protective visor. "I turned off the power myself!"

Her only answer was an electric finger striking a weak spot in her collar.

"Frackin-!" She stumbled backwards off her compressor and landed on the ground. The world spun around her head and she felt her fuel tank roil as the electric charge shook her already downtrodden systems like a mini-con in the grip of a metrotitan. She just managed to twist onto her side before she lost her energon.

Nautica lay there, the high pitch of her cooling fans whining in her auditors. _Maybe I'll just...lay here for awhile..._

"Hey." A mech's voice spoke over her, nearer to her head then she remembered anyone being. "You okay there visor-girl? You want me to get Triage?"

She unshuttered her optics a crack and looked up. The world was still revolving, only now there were two faceplates circling her with it. "Huh-hunky-dory," she told the two identical gray-brown mechs circling her like rust vultures. She managed to clear her vocorder and shove herself up to her hands and knees. "As long as you keep your bad-tempered clutch of a medic away from me."

That got a chuckle out of him as the two mechs merged into one, and he shouldered his Wrecker-sized blaster to hold out a hand to her. She ignored it, only to stumble forward and nearly land nasal-plating first in a grease stain.

"Whoa, you really are out of it," the mech said as he caught her by the shoulder and heaved her upright before she could protest. "I hope you're not here for the heavy lifting."

"I'm the quantum mechanic," she mumbled as she braced herself against the hull and reached for her favorite wrench magnetized to her belt. The feel of it stabilized her somewhat, the divots along its grip more familiar to her than her own reflection.

She caught a faintly incredulous sound, which she put down to the fact she was weaving like an addict rather than her bubbly, youthful personality that so often threw the older generation off. Not that she felt too youthful at the moment. In fact she felt old, weighed down by...something.

Slowly she realized part of it was the mech's attention pinned to her back.

Nautica straightened up stubbornly. "Keep your optics on the perimeter Wrecker," she murmured as she fixed her attention on the _Starlight_. She widened and shrunk her irises a few times to bring her vision back into focus, but static still lingered at the edge of her sight. When she looked over her shoulder guard again, the young mech had a crooked smile on his faceplates as he leaned his blaster against his broad shoulder. He was still watching her.

Nautica ignored him, and ducked back beneath the underbelly of the sleek ship. The sparks had disappeared, ending the lightshow that had tried to fry her system, leaving the mess of crisscrossing wires and circuits dark. They still made far more sense to her than the mech's attention.

He spoke up a handful of cycles later. "So what's it feel like?"

Nautica paused in her work. She leaned down just enough to see if it was the same Wrecker and caught sight of gray-brown legs. She rolled her optics, then winced when it made the world spin. She straightened up and buried herself in her work. "What's what feel like?" she asked as she snapped a connector into place. There must still be some charge left in it because static bit at her digits and she shook them out with a strangled curse before popping them into her mouth.

The mech's voice was right next to her now, beneath the ship. "Being poisoned by the blood of Unicron," he asked in a low voice.

Nautica froze in spite of herself. Slowly, she leaned her head free of the ship's internal workings only to find the mech bending down a few feet away, one arm braced against the outer hull. He smiled at her. The expression felt out of place with the subject matter.

She made sure to lift her optic ridges over flat optics. "Don't be archaic," she told him. "It's dark energon. Just because it's purple and poisonous doesn't make it the blood of a so-called _Unmaker_." She scoffed.

That made his grin grow, but only on one side, turning his face lopsided. "Ah, a skeptic. My very favorite kind of combatant."

He rested the butt of his Wrecker-sized blaster rifle against the ground near his foot, then leaned an elbow on the outer lip, chin resting in his hand. Nautica rolled her optics. "Better a skeptic than a stubborn fool. Get out of here before I find out if I can fix this broken sensor board with your annoying circuits."

She swept a hand at him and nearly toppled out of the hatchway again. "Whoa there." He managed to snag her arm, digits slipping past her light armor to make contact with her overheated protoform. Maybe it was the work, or maybe just the remnants of the dark energon, but built-up electricity arced out of her arm and into his hand, shocking him as it raced up his arm.

The Wrecker shouted, letting go of Nautica's arm and she completed her slump to the ground in a lightheaded daze. The weight bearing down on her had evaporated fast enough that for a moment she didn't feel like she was connected to her own body.

The mech was still shaking out his hand when the two visions of him finally swum together again. He was watching her again, but now his face was perfectly serious. "So why'd they let a bot as dead on her feet as you off the circuit slab anyway?" he asked her.

Finally feeling stable enough to stand without wobbling, Nautica straightened up and stuck her head back in the hatchway, her voice coming out a little muffled. "Because geniuses never get bed rest."

His chuckle was overridden by Arcee's voice. "Val, why are you annoying the one femme that can save the rest of us? Go bug your own mechanic."

Val straightened up as Arcee joined them, a wry expression on her face as she looked at the Wrecker. It took Nautica a slow cycle to realize it was because they knew each other.

The Wrecker-mech held up his hands in surrender – _How'd she do that?_ – his blaster tucked under one bulky arm. "All right, all right. Just trying to be friendly. Sheesh."

"Yeah, and we all know what kind of friends you're after at the moment." Arcee shoved his shoulder with a grin on her faceplates. "You might want to hurry back. Leadfoot's starting to pull out more parts than put in."

Val looked over his shoulder guard and cursed before leaping away, nearly tripping over his own legs as he shouted at the Wrecker tearing wires in haphazard fashion out of the _Steelhaven's_ wing joint. Nautica shook her head at him, but the chuckle escaped anyway. "He's rather roguish," she told Arcee with a small shrug, "for a clown."

Arcee's mouth lifted in a smile. "Yeah well, I wouldn't get your hopes too high on that front." She shot her a significant look. "Someone else set her sights on him _vorns_ ago."

Nautica frowned, wondering why she didn't just come out and give her a name...until she followed Arcee's pointed look behind her and saw Molly standing not far enough away, her arms crossed over her chest plates in a sulk. No doubt the younger femme had seen every sly look Val had shot Nautica's way.

"Kinda washy of him," Nautica murmured as she straightened up to keep the energon from pooling in her central processor, "admiring the sheen on my paint when he's already got someone."

Arcee raised an optic ridge at her. "Oh, please. It's only washy if they were actually _together_." She shrugged. "As things stand now, Val's just a lonesome flirt."

"Hmm," Nautica hummed as she craned her neck and went back to work on the frazzled sensor board. "That makes even less sense. If she wants him, she should actually _have_ him. I mean, what's she waiting for, an invitation?"

Arcee's engine revved in a low chuckle. "Yeah, well, when she realizes what she wants, I'll send her one myself." Her faceplates sobered and she nodded at the open underbelly of the _Starlight_ as Nautica shook her head. Social conventions never had made much sense to her. Maybe if someone had bothered to write them all down for her to study...?

"How's it coming anyway?" Arcee asked her, optics watching the high rim of the valley.

Nautica sunk her arm up to the shoulder joint into the ship, searching for the haywire power source that must have started the overload that had jumped from her to the Wrecker Val. "Something was acting up a cycle ago..." She searched another cycle, but the board was dead again. "But it looks like it's gone out. Must've been a stray current." But her frown didn't lighten.

"Is that all? That doesn't sound too bad." Arcee sounded optimistic.

Nautica snorted through her vents as she retracted her arm, then had to wait for the fuel that rose up her intake to sink back down again. "Guh-uh, no. The, um, the sensor board is busted, but that's easy enough to fix. The real problem is the stabilizer it fried on its way out," she said as she wiped grease off her arm, then passed the rag across her mouth.

"What's it stabilize?"

Nautica leaned her arms against the open ship so she could rest her forehead against them. "Our quantum engines. Without the stabilizer, they'll fluctuate endlessly, sending us from Primax to Uniend between spark beats and overtaxing us to the point we'd wish it was delirium."

Arcee frowned at her. "You wanna try that again?"

Nautica groaned and shuttered her optics. _Why can't they just let me lay down?_ "Endless spirals of death and madness," she reiterated.

The frown etched deeper into Arcee's faceplates. "Can you fix it in time?"

Nautica forced her optics online. She washed her overheated systems in cool air and then vented it again before straightening up. "I'll have to. I'm tired of feeling like a burnt out toaster."

Arcee hiccupped a snort as she turned back to the landscape of garbage. "Tell me about it."

...

Her data stream shivered as she rode the broad shouldered young mech, trying to get rid of the foul air clinging to her. _Dark energon_. She remembered it very well from...well, from somewhere. Where wasn't as important as the fact that she remembered it. Obviously. And the stench was unmistakable.

She shook herself out and the mech she was clinging to scratched at his shoulder where she perched in his empty weapon's mount, using the unused targeting sensors to see where they were going next.

He was jogging with purpose, and the ride was bumpy, and it took her several strides to make sense of what was going on. There was another smaller mech still far off...oh, no, wait. He was just short. They were almost on top of him where he stood clawing things out of the big ship hanging over them and flinging them out behind him.

 _He could be fun..._ she thought, but she wasn't convinced. Random destruction, while entertaining, fizzled quickly. And hadn't she come down here for a reason anyway?

"What're you doing Leadfoot?" Val shouted at the older Wrecker. "You're supposed to be fixing the ship, not breaking the parts that still work!"

She missed the short mech's answer, caught up in her own data stream as she tried to figure out just what it was she'd forgotten. There had been something, hadn't there? Something important or had she just imagined that?

"Still work? This old timer isn't even a rust bucket! Look at this! _Look at this_!" The short mech shoved something greasy and oiled-stained under Val's nasal plating. _I think it used to be a fan belt..._ "And that's just the start. Stripped gears, cracked lines, more rusted circuits then I got synapses-"

Val rolled his optics and snorted. "Like that's such a stretch," he grumbled.

Leadoot growled something and waved him off. They went on arguing, gesturing so broadly that she rocked in the shoulder mounting. But her attention was fixated on a memory she hadn't noticed before tickling at the recesses of her processor. There _had_ been a reason she'd come here. Beyond just looking for something fun to do anyway.

"What do you mean no parts? We're surrounded by parts!" Val was saying.

The older mech huffed, his outer armor scraping against itself. "Parts of parts more like. Not even scraplets would touch this stuff. That's why it's still here!"

Yes...yes there had been something... A specific something she was supposed to do. Had she heard the Old Programmer talk about the ships? Was she one of the missing parts the ship-breaker needed? _Oh_! _Why did Programmer have to mumble so much when he talked to me?_

"Look, just- can you stop tearing things out? Before the Commander sees you if at all possible, because I'll tell you now – I'm not even going to try and explain that to him."

The mech's rude answer was entertaining, but all their yammering was making it difficult to think! What _had_ she come down here for? Maybe it was time to move somewhere quieter...

Ah well, she was losing interest in the pair of them anyway. She gave up trying to think around their clamor and slipped up the mech's arm when he gestured above his head, and then jumped into the sleeping hulk of the half-shelled ship above them in a static burst. Something...something...

She was so distracted about what it was she had forgotten to do – and so terribly important it must be too to involve her at all! – that she didn't notice the femme crawling around the ship until she smacked right into her.

"Ouch!" the stranger cried as her data stream shocked already singed fingers. For a moment, she was juggled through the redundant safety protocols of the scuffed up sea-green armor she'd run into, too confused to think. It wasn't until she finally got herself sorted and realized who she was with now that she remembered.

 _Oh! Yes, you'll take me right to him. How convenient._

...

Leadfoot's clanging was even more obnoxious from inside the _Steelhaven_. Every little sound echoed. _Only he doesn't exactly make little sounds. But then what did I expect from a guy named 'Leadfoot'?_

Wheeljack leaned across the bridge's secondary control panel and toggled a switch. He sat back with a vent of warm air. "Still nothing," he grumbled as he scraped a palm across his helm.

"Did that one work?" Moonracer's voice sounded tinny behind him where she shouted from down the hall.

" _No_ ," Wheeljack shouted back. He slammed his elbow joints on the dash and held his head up. Maybe if he just stared at them long enough they'd work.

"How about now?" Moonracer shouted.

Wheeljack vented a sigh, then stood up enough to reach the switch. "No, not- _Ah!_ "

"What? What is it?" There was the sound of metal slamming into metal and Moonracer's familiar, "Youch!"

Wheeljack was on his feet, circuits frazzling as he panicked. "It's on fire!"

" _What_!"

" _I said it's on fire_!"

"I heard what you said! That was a cry of exclamation! _Whoa_!"

The even more familiar thump of Moonracer falling to the floor came from behind him. Wheeljack spun around, for a nano klik forgetting his ship was currently trying to burn to the ground as he worried if the femme was all right. He stopped when he saw she wasn't sprawled out on the floor of the main corridor, but dangling from the tangle of wires she'd been crawling through for him a cycle ago. The thump had been her helm smacking the deck.

Both her optics were bright when she looked at him. _Most likely no concussion_ , he thought as he ran forward and untangled her feet from the turbo rat's nest of wires.

She took her weight on her hands with a grunt and tumbled the rest of the way to the deck. "Thanks," she gasped, one hand on her head as she stood up. "I guess it wasn't a big fire. That's good." She sighed in relief.

Wheeljack went still. "What now?"

Moonracer's optics flared. "You _forgot_?" Wheeljack was already running around her. "How could you _forget_ to put out a _fire_?" She paused. "And on the _bridge_! Oh!"

He heard her following close behind, but it didn't register as he slid to a stop in the open doorway and wildly looked around for the fire extinguisher. He didn't find it before Moonracer ran into his back.

They scrambled for an extinguisher, but the old junker didn't exactly conform with safety protocols. That's what they'd been in here testing.

"This is what Ultra Magnus gets for telling us to be thorough!" Wheeljack snarled behind his face mask as he finished going through the lower storage units only to come up empty.

"Oh, for the light of the AllSpark! Get over here!" Moonracer grabbed his arm and yanked him toward the blaze. He got out a strangled shout before she triggered the emergency extinguishers in his arm. Fire suppressant sprayed out in a white stream and smothered the small fire completely.

They stood there for a klik, their systems slowly returning to normal. "Well-" Moonracer reached up and flicked foam off her cheek with a finger, "-I guess someone's still having some memory issues."

Wheeljack looked down at himself to see he was no better. Foam had sprayed all down his chest. He brushed it away as he tallied up the damage done to the _Steelhaven's_ controls. "Actually I've been forgetting about those things for decacycles. I'm pretty sure Ratchet installed them when I was in recharge."

Moonracer shot him a look that said that explained a lot, and then leaned over the dash and craned her neck to try and see what had burned. "Looks like it only left some scorch marks," she told him. "Now if only Ultra Magnus wasn't signing off on this thing, that would be good news."

The engineer coughed a grunt and realized he was staring at her hands as she prodded aside dangling wires. She had long, slender fingers that didn't quite match the bulky width of her cheery armor. His were stocky and powerful, useful enough for loosening stubborn bolts and getting a good grip on his tools, but not fine like hers.

"Well at least we won't have to deal with him for much longer," Moonracer was still talking. "I mean can you imagine being stuck in a tin can with _him_ and his endless war on dirt for millions of years?"

She laughed, but Wheeljack didn't laugh with her. She turned around and saw his optics had turned faintly white around the edges above his mask. "What is it?"

She hadn't made the connection, Wheeljack realized. But then why should she? He'd been so caught up in the coming attack on the drone net it hadn't occurred to him he was even going to be flying on one of these wrecks-waiting-to-happen at all.

"I was...just imagining what he's going to do when I blow a hole in the side of the _Steelhaven_ for the first time. Can't imagine that'll be a pleasant conversation."

The understanding came into her optics. "You had to be transferred to the Wreckers when Triage took you. I forgot about that."

"Well, I'd hate to think of the typo that would get me assigned to Elita-One." Very few of the femmes had survived Megatron's purge, and in the following years they had banded together to survive the ragged hole he'd cut out of them. They were a tightly welded unit – closer than chainmail – and their cohesion straddled the gray zone between unit and family that Wheeljack had noticed before in other Autobot sub-units.

 _I can't just up and join with Elita-One, and I'm not about to ask Moonracer to leave them. We could always ask for a special allowance, but they'd only go for if we- well, if we were- sparkmates._

His spark stuttered in his chest so hard it nearly stopped revolving. He cleared his vocorder in a gargle of static to cover the rev of his engine.

The sudden noise startled Moonracer and she jumped as she came back to herself. "I- I guess...I didn't quite think things all the way through," she murmured, waving a hand vaguely at the _Steelhaven's_ interior. "Pretty stupid, when we're fixing this old clunker up, huh?"

Wheeljack caught himself starting to nod and quickly switched gears. "No, no, I, erm, well I didn't realize until now either."

She raised her optic ridges at him, a sly smile pulling at her face plates. "You only just realized you're not a femme?"

His optics fizzled into a flat blue. "Ha ha." He scraped a palm down the back of his neck showing beneath his helm. "I meant that, well, I never realized that we...have a deadline coming up, I guess."

Moonracer's teasing expression disappeared. "Deadline, huh?"

Wheeljack's engine stuttered as he realized how morbid that sounded given they were due to face Shockwave and his twin hoards of metal-eating doom and whatever other horrors he had hidden away in less than nine orbital cycles. _It would be just my luck that turns into a literal phrase._

He slowed his pounding spark and managed to sputter, "Poor choice of words, Luna."

Her smile was watery and evaporated quickly. "Really poor," she told him, turning away and releasing one of the over-the-head panels, pulling it down to reveal a turbo-rat's nest of colored wires. Oh, and a nest of turbo-rats. Fun.

The sudden chaos of little blue-steel rats running every which way bought Wheeljack some time to think. _We're in the same place,_ he thought as he stomped down hard in front of a hole to keep one of the rodents from disappearing into what was left of the electrical systems. _For now anyway, but that's not going to last long and then what do we do? Go on virtual dates? Eck! Moonracer likes having things in arm's reach, and I'll just miss her more knowing it's all saved holograms. We won't even be able to speak in real time, more likely than not. But if it's all we'll get...I guess I'd rather have a hologram than nothing. And this is all assuming I survive my own plan, which is...not a clear certainty._

Wheeljack vented a deep sigh, too practical or pessimistic to tell himself that it was. He looked over at Moonracer, skinny, whip-like turbor-rat tails clutched in each fist as she repeated, "Ew, ew, ew, ew, ewww!" as she tossed them under a repurposed garbage bin and sat on it with a shudder.

 _If she thought I missed her before then-_

He came up short, straightening where he stood. He...he _had_ told her. _Right_?

"I think that's all of them," Moonracer's voice snapped him out of trying to remember. He looked up, optics bright. She had gotten back to her feet with her hands above the pouches of her belt and stood as far from the squeaking bin as she could get in the close quarters. There were so many rats trapped underneath it kept scooting sideways. "How many you think got away-"

"I missed you!"

The words popped out of his vocorder louder than he'd intended.

Moonracer froze down to her joints. She stared at him, clearly confused. "Huh?"

"I said," Wheeljack found himself repeating like an idiot, "that I missed you, Luna."

She jerked a thumb at the central corridor. "I was only ten yards away. Did one of those rodents bite you in the head?" she asked.

"No," he said before he actually thought about it. "At least I don't think so." He shook his head quickly. "That's not the point. I was talking about when I was...with Shockwave. I missed you then." He watched her closely, seeing the silver under her white faceplates, the way the blue light of her optics highlighted the gentle slope of her cheeks. "I wasn't sure if I told you that before."

Moonracer watched him for what felt like a long moment, and then she smiled at him, just a little. "You didn't."

Wheeljack would have found it funny that such a slight shift of her muscle cables could send him into a spiraling response of joy and panic, if he hadn't suddenly felt so painfully awkward.

"It's just- you affect me, Moonracer. Most of the time I don't even understand why because the catalysts are so randomized. You smile at me and my spark stutters, that one I understand – it's well documented at the very least by those terrible poets I never liked – but then there's everything else. Like...like you laugh so hard your engine tries to stall at things that aren't even funny, but I want to laugh anyway. Or I want to catch you when you trip just so it isn't odd that I'm holding onto you."

Yeesh, who was he, Bluestreak? But even knowing he was a running motor mouth, Wheeljack had trouble making himself stop.

"Well, you probably won't have to wait too long for that one," Moonracer murmured, her expression so blank it made Wheeljack nervous.

He smiled behind his facemask, wishing she could see even as he was glad it hid how red his face had turned. "I know we haven't had a lot of time together, that hoping for more only feels like begging for tragedy, and I know that distance is hard on everybot, no matter how it is they, they care about another, but I hope- or, or, or to say that is, I would really like if we-" Why was this so freakin' hard?!

Moonracer shut him up with a hand on his windshield and a static kiss that bypassed his mask and popped again his faceplates. Silence had never been so welcome.

She smiled softly at him when she leaned back, but didn't walk away. There was a pleasant buzz in the armor under her palm that Wheeljack had trouble paying attention to when she was looking up at him like that—like she understood exactly what words had eluded him.

Then Moonracer huffed a laugh and shook her head, one corner of her mouth rising higher than the other. "It's a good thing you affect me too, Wheeljack," she told him, and then her eyes turned teasing. "Otherwise I would have to dump you for that awkward verbal spill."

Wheeljack revved his engine in a snort. "Makes me wonder how Bluestreak can keep it up all the time," he said, feeling easier with her standing with him. He looked down at her hand, and put his over it, keeping Moonracer close. "And the...the deadline?" he asked quietly.

She shook her head. "I've missed every important deadline anyone has ever given me." Her silver optic ridges rose to her helm. "Why should I stop now?"

Wheeljack relaxed. He was sure his smile was so wide she could see the edges of it above his mask. "I admire your consistency," he told her, leaning down as the static charge between them built.

She freed her hand not long after and put a safer distance between them, her faceplates flushed and optics a dark blue at their centers. She pointed her first digit at him. "No more distractions, Jackie. We _do_ have to answer to Promptimus Maximus after all and _I'm_ not about to listen to his 'timeliness is only second to cleanliness even in a scrap yard' speech again because of you, thanks. I'm going to finish checking those link-ups. You get back to wiring that control board. And no more fires!" she called over her shoulder. He noticed there was an extra sway in her step.

"I can't promise anything," Wheeljack told her as she sauntered back down the central corridor. He scratched at his chest plates as he watched her go. Her touch had left behind that unprecedented buzzing in his chest and it was now traveling up his arm to his spinal strut, where it darted around the recesses of his cranium like a gleeful greasefly.

"Huh..." He revved his engine, relieved when the buzz dimmed until it was barely noticeable. "Wonder how long she's been able to do that to me?"

In the back of his mind, he almost swore he heard laughter.


End file.
